SECA: security-enhanced communication architecture

In this work, we propose and investigate the idea of enhancing a System-on-Chip (SoC) communication architecture (the fabric that integrates system components and carries the communication traffic between them) to facilitate higher security. We observe that a wide range of common security attacks are manifested as abnormalities in the system-level communication traffic. Therefore, the communication architecture, with its global system-level visibility, can be used to detect them. The communication architecture can also effectively react to security attacks by disallowing the offending communication transactions, or by notifying appropriate components of a security violation. We describe the general principles involved in a security-enhanced communication architecture (SECA) and show how several security objectives can be encoded in terms of policies that govern the inter-component communication traffic. We detail the implementation of SECA in the context of a popular commercial on-...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CASES
• Authors: Joel Coburn, Srivaths Ravi, Anand Raghunathan, Srimat T. Chakradhar
• Keywords: CASES 2005, Communication Architecture, Communication Traffic, Security, System Software