With advancements in chip technology, the number of cores in modern commercial processors continues to rise, leading to increased complexity in interconnects and on-chip networks. This complexity, however, exposes significant security vulnerabilities, primarily in the form of side-channel and covert-channel exploits. Unlike other microarchitectural side-channel attacks, those leveraging on-chip interconnects utilize unique characteristics, allowing attackers to develop novel methods that can bypass existing effective defenses. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of current side-channel and covert-channel attacks based on processor-on-chip interconnects. We categorize these attacks into three types: contention-based, distance-based, and layout-based, according to the specific interconnect characteristics they exploit, and discuss corresponding countermeasures for each. Finally, we provide an outlook on future development trends in processor interconnect side channels. This survey is the first to specifically focus on interconnect-based side channels in processors.

Image security faces increasing challenges with the widespread application of computer science and artificial intelligence. Although chaotic systems are employed to encrypt images and prevent unauthorized access or tampering, the degradation that occurs during the binarization process in chaotic systems reduces security. The chaos- and DNA-based image encryption schemes increases its complexity, while the integration of deep learning with image encryption is still in its infancy and has several shortcomings. An image encryption scheme with high security and efficiency is required for the protection of the image. To address these problems, we propose a novel image encryption scheme based on the lightweight VGG (LVGG), referred to as LVGG-IE. In this work, we design an LVGG network with fewer layers while maintaining a high capacity for feature capture. This network is used to generate a key seed, which is then employed to transform the plaintext image into part of the initial value of a chaotic system, ensuring that the chaos-based key generator correlates with the plaintext image. A dynamic substitution box (S-box) is also designed and used to scramble the randomly shuffled plaintext image. Additionally, a single-connected (SC) layer is combined with a convolution layer from VGG to encrypt the image, where the SC layer is dynamically constructed by the secret key and the convolution kernel is set to $1\times 2$. The encryption efficiency is simulated, and the security is analyzed. The results show that the correlation coefficient between adjacent pixels in the proposed scheme achieves ${10}^{-4}$. The NPCR exceeds 0.9958, and the UACI falls within the theoretical value with a significance level of 0.05. The encryption quality, the security of the dynamic S-box and the SC layer, and the efficiency are tested. The result shows that the proposed image encryption scheme demonstrates high security, efficiency, and robustness, making it effective for image security in various applications.

With the continuous advancement of virtualization technology and the widespread adoption of 5G networks, the application of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture has become increasingly popular and prevalent. While the NFV architecture brings a lot of advantages, it also introduces security challenges, including the effective and efficient verification of the integrity of deployed Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and ensuring the secure operation of VNFs. To address the challenge of efficiently conducting virtual remote attestation for VNFs and establishing trust in virtualized environments like NFV architecture, we propose TVRAVNF, which is a highly efficient and low-cost TEE-based virtual remote attestation scheme for VNFs. The scheme we proposed ensures the security and effectiveness of the virtual remote attestation process by leveraging TEE. Furthermore, we introduces a novel local attestation mechanism, which not only reduces the overall overhead of the virtual remote attestation process but also shortens the attestation interval to mitigate Time-Of-Check-Time-Of-Use attacks, thereby enhancing overall security. We conduct experiments to validate the overhead of the TVRAVNF scheme and compare its performance with that of a typical remote attestation process within a maximum unattested time interval. The experimental results demonstrate that, by employing the local attestation mechanism, our solution achieves nearly an 80% significant performance improvement with a relatively small time overhead for small to medium-sized files. This further substantiates the significant advantages of our approach in both security and efficiency.

Cloud computing, as the most widely applied and prominent domain of distributed systems, has brought numerous advantages to users, including high resource sharing efficiency, strong availability, and excellent scalability. However, the complexity of cloud computing environments also introduces various risks and challenges. In the current landscape with numerous cloud service providers and diverse hardware configurations in cloud environments, addressing challenges such as establishing trust chains, achieving general-purpose virtual remote attestation, and ensuring secure virtual machine migration becomes a crucial issue that traditional remote attestation architectures cannot adequately handle. Confronted with these issues in a heterogeneous multi-cloud environment, we present a targeted solution—a secure migration-enabled generic virtual remote attestation architecture based on improved TEE. We introduce a hardware trusted module to establish and bind with a Virtual Root of Trust (VRoT), addressing the challenge of trust chain establishment. Simultaneously, our architecture utilizes the VRoT within TEE to realize a general-purpose virtual remote attestation solution across heterogeneous hardware configurations. Furthermore, we design a controller deployed in the trusted domain to verify migration conditions, facilitate key exchange, and manage the migration process, ensuring the security and integrity of virtual machine migration. Lastly, we conduct rigorous experiments to measure the overhead and performance of our proposed remote attestation scheme and virtual machine secure migration process. The results unequivocally demonstrate that our architecture provides better generality and migration security with only marginal overhead compared to other traditional remote attestation solutions.

Rapid advancements in the Internet have presented new demands for next-generation communication networks. Despite promising techniques such as APN6 and SRV6 have been proposed, research on multi-objective optimal routing, which serves as the fundamental basis for differentiated service delivery, remains limited. Consequently, this paper aims to bridge this research gap by introducing an efficient routing algorithm, NDRA, for multi-objective optimization. The proposed algorithm utilizes the Dijkstra algorithm as the backbone. Besides, a pruning process referring to the term of Pareto domination is introduced to avoid unnecessary path exploration. Evaluations demonstrate that compared to existing methods, our algorithm guarantees that a set of optimal solutions will be found and the computational overhead is affordable across different network scenarios.