Weakness · Medium
CWE-1331: Improper Isolation of Shared Resources in Network On Chip (NoC)
What it is
The Network On Chip (NoC) does not isolate or incorrectly isolates its on-chip-fabric and internal resources such that they are shared between trusted and untrusted agents, creating timing channels.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design, Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Typically, network on chips (NoC) have many internal resources that are shared between packets from different trust domains. These resources include internal buffers, crossbars and switches, individual ports, and channels. The sharing of resources causes contention and introduces interference between differently trusted domains, which poses a security threat via a timing channel, allowing attackers to infer data that belongs to a trusted agent. This may also result in introducing network interference, resulting in degraded throughput and latency.
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Other) (Confidentiality, Availability)
- Varies by Context (Confidentiality, Availability)
- Other (Confidentiality, Availability)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Implement priority-based arbitration inside the NoC and have dedicated buffers or virtual channels for routing secret data from trusted agents.
How to find it
- Manual Analysis. Providing marker flags to send through the interfaces coupled with examination of which users are able to read or manipulate the flags will help verify that the proper isolation has been achieved and is effective.
H2 Security
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.