Title
Partial bitstream protection for low-cost FPGAs with physical unclonable function, obfuscation, and dynamic partial self reconfiguration
Abstract
This paper proposes a technique based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), obfuscation, and Dynamic Partial Self Reconfiguration (DPSR) to protect partial FPGA configuration bitstreams from cloning and reverse engineering. With the aid of this technique, we are able to do the equivalent of partial bitstream encryption on low-cost FPGAs, which is only featured on high-end FPGAs. Low-cost FPGAs do not even have built-in support for encrypted (full) bitstreams. Through DPSR, our PUF implementation does not steal real estate from the encrypted design. We also present a new DPSR flow for Xilinx FPGAs, which is difference-based but still allows modular design. It works regardless of the amount of difference between Partial Reconfiguration (PR) modules and is called DPSR-LD, where LD stands for Large-Difference. DPSR-LD is an enabler especially for Spartan-6 FPGA family, as Xilinx currently supports PR on Spartan-6 only through the difference-based flow and only for small differences. Our DPSR-LD also includes a controller that interfaces to the ICAP and can process compressed bitstreams. It is called ICAP+ and occupies only 1% of Spartan-6 slices.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.compeleceng.2012.10.009
Computers & Electrical Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
dynamic partial self reconfiguration,partial reconfiguration,spartan-6 fpga family,difference-based flow,low-cost fpgas,partial bitstream protection,partial fpga configuration bitstreams,high-end fpgas,new dpsr flow,physical unclonable function,spartan-6 slice,xilinx fpgas
Computer science,Reverse engineering,Field-programmable gate array,Encryption,Real-time computing,Physical unclonable function,Modular design,Bitstream,Obfuscation,Control reconfiguration,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
39
2
0045-7906
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.54
19
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sezer Gören16411.62
Ozgur Ozkurt2142.06
Abdullah Yildiz3142.73
H. Fatih Ugurdag45211.28
Rajat Subhra Chakraborty5102981.56
Debdeep Mukhopadhyay6921123.07