Secure Multi-Path Routing with All-or-Nothing Transform for Network-on-Chip Architectures

2026-01-20

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of eavesdropping attacks by malicious nodes in Networks-on-Chip (NoCs), where conventional encryption imposes prohibitive overhead in resource-constrained System-on-Chip (SoC) environments. To mitigate this, the paper proposes a lightweight secure communication mechanism that uniquely integrates All-or-Nothing Transform (AONT), grounded in quasigroup theory, with non-overlapping multipath routing. In this approach, packets are first transformed via AONT and then fragmented into blocks that traverse mutually exclusive paths in parallel, ensuring that intermediate routers cannot reconstruct the original data. The method effectively thwarts eavesdropping attacks while introducing negligible area and performance overhead, achieving a 7.3× reduction in security-related costs compared to traditional encryption schemes.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

Ensuring Network-on-Chip (NoC) security is crucial to design trustworthy NoC-based System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. While there are various threats that exploit on-chip communication vulnerabilities, eavesdropping attacks via malicious nodes are among the most common and stealthy. Although encryption can secure packets for confidentiality, it may introduce unacceptable overhead for resource-constrained SoCs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight confidentiality-preserving framework that utilizes a quasi-group based All-Or-Nothing Transform (AONT) combined with secure multi-path routing in NoC-based SoCs. By applying AONT to each packet and distributing its transformed blocks across multiple non-overlapping routes, we ensure that no intermediate router can reconstruct the original data without all blocks. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method effectively mitigates eavesdropping attacks by malicious routers with negligible area and performance overhead. Our results also reveal that AONT-based multi-path routing can provide 7.3x reduction in overhead compared to traditional encryption for securing against eavesdropping attacks.

Problem

• Network-on-Chip
• eavesdropping attacks
• confidentiality
• malicious nodes
• secure communication

Innovation

• All-Or-Nothing Transform
• Secure Multi-Path Routing
• Network-on-Chip
• Lightweight Security
• Quasi-Group