The increasing adoption of multi-core Systems-on-Chip (SoC) in critical systems has turned security into an important design requirement. In addition to making a SoC tamper-resistant by embedding cryptographic solutions, in order to make a system robust, we need to control the level of access to the critical functions and capabilities. We propose a hardware protection architecture to enhance a traditional SoC platform in terms of protection. These hardware enhancements focus on isolating physical memory compartments by applying access rules, thus we allow dynamic security policies to be enforced at the hardware for protection against untrustworthy hardware or software components. We present and analyze an implementation of a prototype that allows sixteen concurrently active protection domains at a system cost of less that three percent and negligible operational overhead.

In this paper, we describe the design of a heterogeneous island-based network-on-chip to achieve a power-and thermal-aware coherent system. To this end we utilize different management techniques which employ dynamic frequency scaling circuitry and continuous monitoring through power and temperature sensors per node for dynamic control of workloads. Both monitoring functions and response mechanisms can be engaged in distributed and in centralized mode. The developed multi-core architecture on a multi-FPGA platform employes a hierarchical memory model and supports a multi-threaded general-purpose processor together with many soft-core accelerators per node with independent dynamic frequency scaling per core. Utilizing on-line monitoring we propose a novel response mechanism using a distributed power management algorithm to evenly reduce and normalize power transients.

In multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), a CPU can access physical resources, such as on-chip memory or I/O devices. Along with normal requests, malevolent ones, generated by malicious processes running in one or more CPUs, could occur. A protection mechanism is therefore required to prevent injection of malicious instructions or data across the system. We propose a self-contained Network-on-Chip (NoC) firewall at the network interface (NI) layer which, by checking the physical address against a set of rules, rejects untrusted CPU requests to the on-chip memory, thus protecting all legitimate processes running in a multicore SoC. To sustain high performance, we implement the firewall in hardware, with rule-checking performed at segment-level based on deny rules. Furthermore, to evaluate its impact, we develop a novel framework on top of gem5 simulation environment, coupling ARM technology and an instance of a commercial point-to-point interconnect from STMicroelectronics (STNoC). Simulation tests include scenarios in which legitimate and malicious processes, running in different CPUs, request access to shared memory. Our results indicate that a firewall implementation at the NI can have a positive effect on network performance by reducing both end-to-end network delay and power consumption. We also show that our coarse-grain firewall can prevent saturation of the on-chip network and performs better than fine-grain alternatives that perform rule checking at page-level. Simulation results are accompanied with field measurements performed on a Zedboard platform running Linux, whereas the NoC Firewall is implemented as a reconfigurable, memory-mapped device on top of AMBA AXI4 interconnect fabric.

As the development of heterogeneous embedded Systems-on-Chip with a multitude of hardware accelerator coprocessors creates new possibilities for evolution in aerospace, medicine, communications and consumer eras, improving reliable performance of systems is therefore increasingly important and challenging. Our contributions pertaining to this context are two-fold. We focus on enhancing reliability in the execution of coprocessor tasks with a priori known execution times by allowing an embedded system to identify anomalous software behaviors and additionally to provide rapid online reconfiguration and re-execution in run-time. We present an innovative methodology that combines hardware and software techniques for flexibility, through essentially employing low-cost on-line monitoring, debugging and real-time replacement of the failing sections of software algorithms in an embedded multi-core system. The proposed mechanisms introduce negligible performance degradation, reduced hardware cost and require minimum code instrumentation.

Requirements for rapid turnaround development of complex multi-core Systems-on-Chip nowadays have advanced to the level at which a number of different in principle validation techniques have to be performed in short time. Quite common are hybrids of passive debugging of Systems-on-Chip and event-driven active verification. On top of these, we present a novel highly flexible verification infrastructure, in which parameters of monitoring can be accessible in real-time while the measurement itself is being performed. Instead of simply observing components under development, the proposed infrastructure enables the designer to interact, monitor and adjust in real-time system parameters or application software. This paper explores different microarchitecture alternatives to efficiently support flexible real-time monitoring via hardware configurable monitors which can provide abstractions of the information. A quantitative evaluation of the proposed methodology on a system-on-FPGA provides results that can serve as guidelines for system-level designers, proving the need for flexible and at the same time efficient filters for real-time monitors inside complex multi-core SoCs.