SecONet: A Security Framework for a Photonic Network-on-Chip

Photonic networks are already commercially available at the board-level, and many fabrication facilities can fabricate optical networks and integrate them with traditional silicon-based SoCs. Almost all the research in on-chip photonics has been in the areas of performance enhancement and static power reduction. However, before the large-scale adoption of such technologies, it is necessary to solve security problems. As opposed to electrical NoCs, optical NoCs are shared to a much larger extent, and are significantly more sensitive to the latencies of cryptographic operations. Hence, it is necessary to design a novel protocol for securing such networks. We propose a novel, secure, and efficient optical network in this paper (SecONet) that is immune to eavesdropping, spoofing, replay, and message-removal attacks. Using a combination of speculative execution and pre-computation, we reduce the performance overhead of 39.53% with a conventional implementation to 14.2% for a suite of Splash2 and Parsec benchmarks. The additional area overhead of our proposed hardware is modest: 1.6%.