Communications becomes a bottleneck as we push for more cores in even basic computers, according to Paul Ampadu, an ECE professor trying to solve this challenge. Even the newer models of smart phones have eight cores, and the trend shows no signs of stopping.

“Why? Because we have demanded more performance, more efficiency, more power, and we want it all on ever-smaller systems,” said Ampadu.

Researchers are meeting this demand for multicore platforms by developing more reliable, energy-efficient, heterogeneous Networks-on-Chip (NoC), a highly scal-able upgrade to the conventional bus-based System-on-Chip (SOC) design. But, as more cores are integrated onto each chip, these new configurations present new security holes. Ampadu and his team are investigat-ing how NoCs are vulnerable and how to fortify them. 

With a mesh NoC topology, all nodes (cores) can access resources without a shared bus. One node can interact with any other 

via a series of simple hops. “We’ve cut back on direct connections between nodes,” said Ampadu. “But that exposes the system to se-curity threats.”

An NoC environment is especially sus-ceptible to noninvasive attacks like side channel attacks, where an attacker could use shared resources like routers to steal data or gather information to mount a more aggres-sive attack.

Approximation

Ampadu and his team, including grad-uate student Shenghou (Minux) Ma, are investigating techniques to defend NoCs, particularly for approximate computing applications.

Many applications that are well suited to run on NoCs will be making decisions, predicting trends, recognizing faces, and other tasks that require multiple iterations in parallel. These types of tasks lend themselves to approximation, said Ampadu. 

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