Title
FLATS: Filling Logic and Testing Spatially for FPGA Authentication and Tamper Detection
Abstract
Security-critical field programmable gate array (FPGA) designs traditionally rely on bitstream encryption and hashing to prevent bitstream modifications and provide design authentication. Recent attacks to extract bitstream encryption keys, and research in automated bitstream manipulation tools, have created a class of vulnerabilities involving post-synthesis low-level FPGA editing. Current authentication and tamper (e.g., malicious modification) detection approaches dependent upon hash-based comparison mechanisms and register transfer level safeguards are vulnerable to these post-synthesis exploits. In this paper, we propose FLATS, which provides filling logic and testing spatially to combat such vulnerability. FLATS fills unused lookup tables (LUTs) within the FPGA design and inserts infrared-emitting spatial watermarks into the partially used LUTs at the post-synthesis stage for physical authentication and tamper detection using backside infrared imaging. FLATS takes an existing synthesized design and re-purposes a portion of its LUT initialization to function as a watermark allowing for the detection of changes to the post-synthesis placement and initialization. Experimental results validate the FLATS architecture on a 28nm Xilinx FPGA with less than 12% look-up table utilization overhead and negligible compromises in power and speed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/HST.2019.8741025
2019 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)
Keywords
Field
DocType
FPGA,3PIPs,watermark,infrared
Lookup table,Digital watermarking,Computer science,Field-programmable gate array,Real-time computing,Watermark,Encryption,Hash function,Register-transfer level,Bitstream,Computer hardware
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-8065-0
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Adam Duncan111.37
Grant Skipper200.34
Andrew Stern311.37
Adib Nahiyan411.37
Fahim Rahman500.34
Andrew Lukefahr61537.08
Mohammad Tehranipoor73181243.40
Mohammad Tehranipoor83181243.40