Attacking Real-time MPSoCs: Preemptive NoCs are Vulnerable

Multi-Processor System-on-Chip is one of the todays standard platforms which has being used in several applications, including time critical. In order to meet safety, thus attending real-time constraints, security may be put aside during the design stage. This is the case of the Priority-Preemptive NoCs, a widely used real-time interconnection structure. Their explicit behavior while dealing with communication flows constrained by tight deadlines creates security flaws. To this end, this work presents three contributions. First, we demonstrate for the first time an attack that exploits preemptive NoC-based MPSoCs. Second, we integrate security countermeasures that avoid these attacks while meeting hard deadlines. Third, we evaluate the impact of the attacks and the protected system. Results show that preemptive NoCs must be protected and that it is possible to effectively and efficiently mitigate the vulnerabilities while keeping the deterministic behavior required for time-critical applications.