A twofold group key agreement protocol for NoC-based MPSoCs

A symmetric group key agreement protocol enables the group members to derive a shared session key for secure communication among them, whereas an asymmetric one facilitates security to any communication from outside, without adding outsiders into the group. In order to combine both the functionalities, a hybrid key agreement protocol is needed, which can output a shared symmetric key for inside communication and an asymmetric key pair for any unrestricted sender. The application mentioned in this paper pushes the need of secure on-chip communication for intersecure and intrasecure zones simultaneously. In particular, we look forward for a solution to ensure communication security among multiple processing clusters actively running on an integrated circuit. The proposed protocol offers a lightweight symmetric encryption for intrazone communication and a public key encryption for interzone communication taking most advanced security issues into account.