Paper Info
Title
Black-Box side-channel attacks highlight the importance of countermeasures: an analysis of the xilinx virtex-4 and virtex-5 bitstream encryption mechanism
Abstract
This paper presents a side-channel analysis of the bitstream encryption mechanism provided by Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. This work covers our results analyzing the Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 family showing that the encryption mechanism can be completely broken with moderate effort. The presented results provide an overview of a practical real-world analysis and should help practitioners to judge the necessity to implement side-channel countermeasures. We demonstrate sophisticated attacks on off-the-shelf FPGAs that go far beyond schoolbook attacks on 8-bit AES S-boxes. We were able to perform the key extraction by using only the measurements of a single power-up. Access to the key enables cloning and manipulating a design, which has been encrypted to protect the intellectual property and to prevent fraud. As a consequence, the target product faces serious threats like IP theft and more advanced attacks such as reverse engineering or the introduction of hardware Trojans. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful attack against the bitstream encryption of Xilinx Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 reported in open literature.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-27954-6_1
CT-RSA
Keywords
Field
DocType
virtex-5 bitstream encryption mechanism,black-box side-channel attack,virtex-5 family,encryption mechanism,xilinx virtex-4,practical real-world analysis,key extraction,xilinx virtex fpgas,side-channel analysis,bitstream encryption,off-the-shelf fpgas,bitstream encryption mechanism
Countermeasure,Black box (phreaking),Computer security,CUDA,Computer science,Reverse engineering,Field-programmable gate array,Encryption,Virtex,Side channel attack,Embedded system
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7178
0302-9743
17
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.92
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amir Moradi196080.66
Markus Kasper2986.37
Christof Paar33794442.62