Attacks toward wireless network-on-chip and countermeasures

A Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) offers a promising solution to reduce broadcast and long distance communication bottlenecks of conventional architectures by augmenting them with single hop wireless links. In this article, we discuss new security vulnerabilities and countermeasures to protect against them in a WiNoC based system. In particular, we describe Malicious Threshold Configuration (MTC) Attack, Disruptive Token Passing (DTP) Attack, Data Stealing by Broadcast (DSB) Attack and Hybrid Attack against the WiNoC. Our proposed countermeasure against MTC-OU (over-utilization) attack i.e., Source Destination checking mechanism decreases wireless hub utilization by 49% and network latency by many orders of magnitude compared to without countermeasure, causing system performance improvement. Another proposed countermeasure against DTP attacks i.e., detour mechanism improves the network throughout by 1.21x and 23x under DTP-AHT and DTP-DOS attacks respectively.