Efficient security zones implementation through hierarchical group key management at NoC-based MPSoCs

Sensitive applications are split into the IP cores of the Multi-Processors System-on-Chip (MPSoCs). In order to isolate the sensitive communication among such IP cores, security zones based on conference keys agreement can be built. However, the flexibility and dynamic nature of MPSoCs force reshaping the security zones at runtime. It is still a challenge to achieve efficient computation and distribution of new conference keys in MPSoC environments. In order to solve this problem, in this work we propose the combination of two techniques: i) high performance NoC, able to efficiently communicate data and control packets in the system; and ii) hierarchical group-key management for efficient security zone modification. We implement three hierarchical protocols and we show that by decentralizing the security management of the rekeying process and using a two-level NoC, it is possible to achieve an improvement of the performance compared to the previous flat approaches.