Hierarchical group-key management for NoC-based MPSoCs protection

Group keys can be used in order to communicate secretly sensitive data among IP cores. However, the flexibility and dynamic nature of MPSoCs force reshaping the security zones at runtime. Members of a zone must be able to efficiently compute the new group key while former members must be prevented for data disclosure. Efficiently creating security zones for achieving sensitive traffic isolation in MPSoC environments is a challenging problem. In this work we present the implementation of hierarchical group-key management for NoC-based systems in order to efficiently perform the rekeying process. We implement three hierarchical protocols and we show that by decentralizing the security management of the rekeying process, it is possible to achieve an improvement of the performance when compared to the previous flat approaches.