Multi-Processor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs) are popular computational platforms for a wide variety of applications due to their energy efficiency and flexibility. Like many other platforms they are vulnerable to Side Channel Attacks (SCAs). In particular, Logical SCAs (LSCAs) are very powerful as sensitive information can be retrieved by simply observing system properties that depend on the victim's software execution on the MPSoC. Unfortunately, many of the current protection mechanisms are either platform dependent or are effective only against a reduced set of attacks. In this work, we present Guard-NoC, a secure Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture able to protect MPSoCs against a wide variety of LSCAs. The secure NoC employs three application-independent strategies to hide and isolate sensitive information: i) blinding the execution time of operations; ii) masking the execution time of operations; and iii) dual communication strategy (i.e., use packet and circuit switching simultaneously). Our results show that our secure NoC is resilient against practical LSCAs and leaks almost no information while having a minimal area and power overhead.

Cache attacks are one of the most wide-spread and dangerous threats to embedded computing systems' security. A promising approach to detect such attacks at runtime is to monitor the System-on-Chip (SoC) behavior. However, designing a secure SoC capable of detecting such attacks is very challenging: the monitors should be lightweight in order to avoid excessive power/energy and area costs and the attack behavior should be clearly known upfront. In this work, we present LiD-CAT, a lightweight and flexible hardware detector that is aware of leakage patterns that can be used by attackers to perform cache based attacks. LiD-CAT is a cache wrapper that implements a set of leakage properties derived from cache attacks and cache models using templates. These templates identify suspicious behavior that may lead to cache attacks. LiD-CAT is evaluated using two different cache architectures, one with a secure cache and one without. On each of them, SPEC2000 benchmarks are run together with malicious applications that execute cache attacks (i.e., Evict+Time, Prime+Probe, Flush+Reload and Flush+Flush). Results show that our lightweight detector successfully detects 99.99% of the attacks with less than 1% false-positives, has no timing penalties, and increases the area of a SoC with only 1.6%.

Increasingly complex and powerful Systems-on-Chips (SoCs), connected through a 5G network, form the basis of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). These technologies will drive the digitalization in all domains, e.g. industry automation, automotive, avionics, and healthcare. A major requirement for all above domains is the long-term (10 to 30 years) secure communication between the SoCs and the cloud over public 5G networks. The foreseeable breakthrough of quantum computers represents a risk for all communication. In order to prepare for such an event, SoCs must integrate secure quantum-computer-resistant cryptography which is reliable and protected against SW and HW attacks. Empowering SoCs with such strong security poses a challenging problem due to limited resources, tight performance requirements and long-term life-cycles. While current works are focused on efficient implementations of post-quantum cryptography, implementation-security and reliability aspects for SoCs are still largely unexplored. To this end, we present three contributions. First, we present a RISC-V co-processor for post-quantum security, able to support lattice-based cryptography. Second, we use HW/SW co-design techniques to accelerate the NTT transformation and hash generation. Third, we perform the fault analysis of the implementation. We show that our coprocessor achieves high reliability and security capabilities while preserving good performance.