Security-Driven Task Scheduling Under Deadline Constraints for MPSoCs With Untrusted 3PIP Cores

The high penetration of third-party intellectual property in MPSoCs gives rise to security concerns, and a set of security-driven constraints is imposed into the task scheduling step of the design process to protect MPSoCs against hardware Trojan attacks. Due to the significant performance and area overheads incurred, designers start to selectively apply security-driven constraints to achieve the design targets, but they often ignore that parts of a design may be more vulnerable to hardware Trojan attacks. In this study, the differences in vulnerability to hardware Trojan attacks are also considered in the MPSoC design process, and a security-driven task scheduling method is proposed to minimize both the design vulnerability and chip area under deadline constraints. First, the schedule length is iteratively optimized by a maximum weight independent set-based method that minimizes the vulnerability increment. Second, tasks are assigned to IP vendors with a minimized number of cores required by maximizing the core sharing of tasks. Finally, tasks are scheduled to time periods using the force-directed scheduling method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing the number of cores while maintaining system security under deadline constraints.