NoC-level Threat Monitoring in Domain-Specific Heterogeneous SoCs with SoCurity

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. In this work, we explore design opportunities with fw, a widely applicable SoC design enhancement that provides protection against resource availability attacks through anomalous activity detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using SoCurity for anomaly detection with a case study on real SoC implementations for a connected autonomous vehicle system and find up to 96.4% detection accuracy. We then discuss how this work can be used to protect against other threats and to enhance system reliability through detection of hardware faults. We propose that a solution like SoCurity can help ease and enable focused threat and fault mitigation built into our systems.