Title
Information Leakage from FPGA Routing and Logic Elements
Abstract
Information leakage in FPGAs poses a danger whenever multiple users share the reconfigurable fabric, for example in multi-tenant Cloud FPGAs, or whenever a potentially malicious IP module is synthesized within a single user's design on an FPGA. In such scenarios, capacitive crosstalk between so-called long routing wires has been previously shown to be a security vulnerability in both Xilinx and Intel FPGAs. Specifically, both static and dynamic values on long wires have been demonstrated to affect the delays of the adjacent long wires, and such delay changes have been exploited to steal sensitive information such as bits of cryptographic keys. While long-wire leakage is now well-understood and can be defended against, this work presents two other, new types of information leaks that pose similar risks, but which have not been studied in the past, and for which existing defenses do not work. First, this paper shows that other types of routing resources (namely medium wires) are also vulnerable to crosstalk, with changes in their delays also measurable fully on-chip. Second, this work introduces a novel source of information leaks that originates from logic elements within the FPGA Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs) and is likely not the result of the capacitive crosstalk effects investigated in prior work. To understand the potential impact of the two new leakage sources, this paper experimentally characterizes and compares them in four families of Xilinx FPGAs, and discusses potential countermeasures in the context of existing attacks and defenses.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3400302.3415695
2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
CLBs,cryptographic keys,Intel FPGAs,single user design,Xilinx FPGAs,leakage sources,capacitive crosstalk effects,FPGA Configurable Logic Blocks,medium wires,routing resources,long-wire leakage,sensitive information,adjacent long wires,delays,security vulnerability,long routing wires,potentially malicious IP module,multitenant cloud FPGAs,reconfigurable fabric,logic elements,FPGA routing,information leakage,IP
Conference
1933-7760
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
17
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ilias Giechaskiel1336.61
Jakub Szefer239837.00