SoCurity: A Design Approach for Enhancing SoC Security

Heterogeneous systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) are increasingly used to meet low-power, high-performance computational requirements but are vulnerable to on-chip resource availability attacks. We propose SoCurity, the first NoC counter-based hardware monitoring approach for enhancing heterogeneous SoC security. With SoCurity, we develop a fast, lightweight anomalous activity detection system leveraging semi-supervised machine learning models that require no prior attack knowledge for detecting anomalies. This design choice provides protection against existing and novel future attacks on SoC resource availability. We demonstrate our techniques with a case study on a real SoC for a connected autonomous vehicle system and find up to 96% detection accuracy.