Masked FPGA Bitstream Encryption via Partial Reconfiguration

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 1940022
Author(s):  
Yanping Gong ◽  
Fengyu Qian ◽  
Lei Wang

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), as one of the popular circuit implementation platforms, provide the flexible and powerful way for different applications. IC designs are configured to FPGA through bitstream files. However, the configuration process can be hacked by side channel attacks (SCA) to acquire the critical design information, even under the protection of encryptions. Reports have shown many successful attacks against the FPGA cryptographic systems during the bitstream loading process to acquire the entire design. Current countermeasures, mostly random masking methods, are effective but also introduce large hardware complexity. They are not suitable for resource-constrained scenarios such as Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, we propose a new secure FPGA masking scheme to counter the SCA. By utilizing the FPGA partial reconfiguration feature, the proposed technique provides a light-weight and flexible solution for the FPGA decryption masking.

Cryptography ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Ivan Bow ◽  
Nahome Bete ◽  
Fareena Saqib ◽  
Wenjie Che ◽  
Chintan Patel ◽  
...  

This paper investigates countermeasures to side-channel attacks. A dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) method is proposed for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)s to make techniques such as differential power analysis (DPA) and correlation power analysis (CPA) difficult and ineffective. We call the technique side-channel power resistance for encryption algorithms using DPR, or SPREAD. SPREAD is designed to reduce cryptographic key related signal correlations in power supply transients by changing components of the hardware implementation on-the-fly using DPR. Replicated primitives within the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm, in particular, the substitution-box (SBOX)s, are synthesized to multiple and distinct gate-level implementations. The different implementations change the delay characteristics of the SBOXs, reducing correlations in the power traces, which, in turn, increases the difficulty of side-channel attacks. The effectiveness of the proposed countermeasures depends greatly on this principle; therefore, the focus of this paper is on the evaluation of implementation diversity techniques.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anees Ullah ◽  
Ali Zahir ◽  
Noaman A. Khan ◽  
Waleed Ahmad ◽  
Alexis Ramos ◽  
...  

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based Ternary Content Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are widely used in high-speed networking applications.However, TCAMs are not present on state-of-the-art FPGAs and need to be emulated on SRAM-based memories (i.e., LUTRAMs and Block RAMs) which requires a large amount of FPGA resources. In this paper, we present an efficient methodology to implement FPGA-based TCAMs with significant resource savings compared to existing schemes. The proposed methodology exploits the fracturable nature of Look Up Tables (LUTs) and the built-in slice carry-chains for simultaneous mapping of two rules and its matching logic to a single FPGA slice. Multiple slices can be stacked together to build deeper and wider TCAMs in a modular way. The combination of all these techniques results in significant savings in resource utilization compared to existing approaches.


Author(s):  
Arul Murugan C. ◽  
Banuselvasaraswathy B.

Internet of things (IoT) is a recent technology, and it will become the next generation of internet that connects several physical objects to interact amongst themselves without the assistance of human beings. It plays a significant role in our day-to-day lives and is used in several applications. IoT is a boon to this modern world, but it lacks in security. It cannot protect the user data from assailants, hackers, and vulnerabilities. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) helps to achieve all these objectives by incorporating secured end-to-end layer into its architecture. In this chapter, ultralow power and reduced area AES architecture with energy efficient DSE-S box techniques and clock gating for IoT applications are introduced. The proposed AES architecture is implemented over different FPGA families such as Cyclone I, Cyclone II, Virtex 5, and Kintex 7, respectively. From the experimental results, it is observed that the Kintex 7 FPGA kit consumes less power than other FPGA families.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schuck ◽  
Bastian Haetzer ◽  
Jü rgen Becker

Partial and dynamic online reconfiguration of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is a promising approach to design high adaptive systems with lower power consumption, higher task specific performance, and even build-in fault tolerance. Different techniques and tool flows have been successfully developed. One of them, the two-dimensional partial reconfiguration, based on the Readback-Modify-Writeback method implemented on Xilinx Virtex devices, makes them ideally suited to be used as a hardware platform in future organic computing systems, where a highly adaptive hardware is necessary. In turn, decentralisation, the key property of an organic computing system, is in contradiction with the central nature of the FPGAs configuration port. Therefore, this paper presents an approach that connects the single ICAP port to a network on chip (NoC) to provide access for all clients of the network. Through this a virtual decentralisation of the ICAP is achieved. Further true 2-dimensional partial reconfiguration is raised to a higher level of abstraction through a lightweight Readback-Modify-Writeback hardware module with different configuration and addressing modes. Results show that configuration data as well as reconfiguration times could be significantly reduced.


Author(s):  
Wei-Wen Lin ◽  
Jih-Sheng Shen ◽  
Pao-Ann Hsiung

With the progress of technology, more and more intellectual properties (IPs) can be integrated into one single chip. The performance bottleneck has shifted from the computation in individual IPs to the communication among IPs. A Network-on-Chip (NoC) was proposed to provide high scalability and parallel communication. An ASIC-implemented NoC lacks flexibility and has a high non-recurring engineering (NRE) cost. As an alternative, we can implement an NoC in a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). In addition, FPGA devices can support dynamic partial reconfiguration such that the hardware circuits can be configured into an FPGA at run time when necessary, without interfering hardware circuits that are already running. Such an FPGA-based NoC, namely reconfigurable NoC (RNoC), is more flexible and the NRE cost of FPGA-based NoC is also much lower than that of an ASIC-based NoC. Because of dynamic partial reconfiguration, there are several issues in the RNoC design. We focus on how communication between hardware and software can be made efficient for RNoC. We implement three communication architectures for RNoC namely single output FIFO-based architecture, multiple output FIFO-based architecture, and shared memory-based architecture. The average communication memory overhead is less on the single output FIFO-based architecture and the shared memory-based architecture than on the multiple output FIFO-based architecture when the lifetime interval is smaller than 0.5. In the performance analysis, some real applications are applied. Real application examples show that performance of the multiple output FIFO-based architecture is more efficient by as much as 1.789 times than the performance of the single output FIFO-based architecture. The performance of the shared memory-based architecture is more efficient by as much as 1.748 times than the performance of the single output FIFO-based architecture.


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