Proposal of a secure network interface for protecting IO communication in many-cores = Proposta de uma interface de rede segura para proteção de comunicação de E/S em many-cores

• Main Author: Rodrigues, Gustavo Comarú
• Publication Date: 2022
• Format: Bachelor thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositório Institucional PUCRS
• Download full: https://hdl.handle.net/10923/26395
• topic: SISTEMAS MULTI-NÚCLEOS BASEADOS EM REDES INTRA-CHIP; SEGURANÇA; OSZ (ZONAS SEGURAS OPACAS); COMUNICAÇÃO SEGURA; PERIFÉRICOS; NOC-BASED MANY-CORES, SECURITY; OSZ (OPAQUE SECURE ZONES); SECURE COMMUNICATION; NI (NETWORK INTERFACE); PERIPHERALS

Many-cores are platforms designed to provide high-performance through the use of parallelism, meeting the current demand of embedded devices with power consumption and communication constraints. A many-core contains PEs (Processing Elements) interconnected by complex communication infrastructures, such as NoCs (Networks-on-Chip). Network Interfaces (NI) connect PEs to the routers of the NoC. As the adoption and complexity of many-cores increase, data protection appears as a design requirement. These systems handle sensitive information. Thus, it is necessary to protect this data from unauthorized access. The literature presents security techniques, such as cryptography, authentication codes, error correction codes, creation of a communication flow profile to detect anomalous behavior. These defense mechanisms seek to protect the many-core from a given attack, lacking proposals protecting the system against the plethora of possible threats. The Opaque Secure Zone (OSZ) is a defense mechanism executed at runtime that focuses on finding a rectilinear region with free PEs to map an application with security constraints. OSZ prevent attacks from outside sources, such as Denial-of-Service (DoS), timing attack, spoofing, man-in-the-middle. Even though the method is robust against external attacks, it still presents vulnerabilities when the application running in the OSZ needs to communicate with external peripherals. This work complements the OSZ security mechanism by proposing a Secure Network Interface (SNI) to protect the communication between applications and IO devices. By enforcing a master-slave communication model and implementing a lightweight authentication protocol, the SNI protects the system from spoofing and flooding attacks involving the peripheral.