Efficient Timing Channel Protection for On-Chip Network

On-chip network is often dynamically shared
among applications that are concurrently running on a chipmultiprocessor
(CMP). In general, such shared resources imply
that applications can affect each other’s timing characteristics
through interference in shared resources. For example, in onchip
networks, multiple flows can compete for links and buffers.
We show that this interference is an attack vector through
which a malicious application may be able to infer datadependent
information about other applications (side channel
attacks), or two applications can exchange information covertly
when direct communications are prohibited (covert channel
attacks).