Securing silicon photonic NoCs against hardware attacks

Photonic networks-on-chip (PNoCs) enable high bandwidth on-chip data transfers by using photonic waveguides capable of dense-wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) for signal traversal and microring resonators (MRs) for signal modulation. A Hardware Trojan in a PNoC can manipulate the electrical driving circuit of its MRs to cause the MRs to snoop data from the neighboring wavelength channels in a shared photonic waveguide. This introduces a serious security threat. This chapter presents a novel framework called SOTERIA that utilizes process variation based authentication signatures along with architecture-level enhancements to protect data in PNoC architectures from snooping attacks. With a minimal overheads of up to 10.6% in average latency and of up to 13.3% in energy-delay-product (EDP) our approach can significantly enhance the hardware security in DWDM-based PNoCs.