BHT-NoC: Blaming Hardware Trojans in NoC Routers

Abstract

Due to the cost and complexity of current multicore CPUs, chipmakers rely heavily on third-party IPs. A hostile IP or hardware Trojan (HT) on the Network-on-Chip (NoC) can degrade or leak packets. Several ways to identify HT in NoCs have been presented, but they are not robust. In this work, we propose the Blaming Hardware Trojan (BHT), which causes false positive HTs by exploiting current security features to decrease system performance. The proposed BHT attack can reduce affected router performance by 36.39%, and overall performance by 9.79%. The proposed countermeasure can recover it by losing only 2.6% performance.