Network-on-Chip (NoC) enables energy-efficient communication between numerous components in System-on-Chip architectures. The optical NoC is widely considered a key technology to overcome the bandwidth and energy limitations of traditional electrical on-chip interconnects. While optical NoC can offer high performance, they come with inherent security vulnerabilities due to the nature of optical interconnects. In this paper, we investigate the gain competition attack in optical NoCs, which can be initiated by an attacker injecting a high-power signal to the optical waveguide, robbing the legitimate signals of amplification. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed approach is the first attempt to investigate gain competition attacks as a security threat in optical NoCs. We model the attack and analyze its effects on optical NoC performance. We also propose potential attack detection techniques and countermeasures to mitigate the attack. Our experimental evaluation using different NoC topologies and diverse traffic patterns demonstrates the effectiveness of our modeling and exploration of gain competition attacks in optical NoC architectures.

翻译：片上网络（NoC）能够实现系统级芯片架构中众多组件间的节能通信。光NoC被广泛视为克服传统电学片内互连带宽与能量限制的关键技术。尽管光NoC能提供高性能，但光互连的本质特性使其存在固有安全漏洞。本文研究了光NoC中的增益竞争攻击——攻击者可通过向光波导注入高功率信号，剥夺合法信号的放大能力。据我们所知，本文提出的方法是首次将增益竞争攻击作为光NoC安全威胁进行研究的尝试。我们对攻击进行建模，分析其对光NoC性能的影响，并提出潜在的攻击检测技术与防护对策。基于不同NoC拓扑结构与多样流量模式的实验评估，验证了我们在光NoC架构中建模与探索增益竞争攻击的有效性。