A Runtime Protection Strategy Against Delayed Trojan Attacks in Multi-Processor System-on-Chip

It has been demonstrated that Networks-on-Chip (NoC) have the capacity to reduce the cost and time of production of Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC). However, the complexity and vulnerabilities of the open semiconductor supply chain cause the risk of Hardware Trojans (HT). This has the potential to exacerbate network congestion, affecting system performance and creating security risks. To counter the security threat brought by the delay-trojan, this paper presents a defense strategy against the security threat of delay-trojan in MPSoC. First, we perform network traffic analysis to identify abnormal packets and locate Trojans through path-crossing analysis. Then, we generate special packets to alert neighboring routers and thus block the impact of hardware trojans to a certain extent. Finally, we implement a trojan-aware routing algorithm to isolate trojans and mitigate their effects on the network. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy can detect and defend HT attacks with a success rate of 97.925%, and has a negligible impact on system performance. Compared with the existing methods, the total network latency is reduced by 9.93%, and the throughput is increased by 15.31% on average.