Breaking NoC Anonymity using Flow Correlation Attack

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is widely used as the internal communication fabric in today's multicore System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Security of the on-chip communication is crucial because exploiting any vulnerability in shared NoC would be a goldmine for an attacker. NoC security relies on effective countermeasures against diverse attacks. We investigate the security strength of existing anonymous routing protocols in NoC architectures. Specifically, this paper makes two important contributions. We show that the existing anonymous routing is vulnerable to machine learning (ML) based flow correlation attacks on NoCs. We propose a lightweight anonymous routing that use traffic obfuscation techniques which can defend against ML-based flow correlation attacks. Experimental studies using both real and synthetic traffic reveal that our proposed attack is successful against state-of-the-art anonymous routing in NoC architectures with a high accuracy (up to 99%) for diverse traffic patterns, while our lightweight countermeasure can defend against ML-based attacks with minor hardware and performance overhead.