Active Fences against Voltage-based Side Channels in Multi-Tenant FPGAs

Dynamic and partial reconfiguration together with hardware parallelism make FPGAs attractive as virtualized accelerators. However, recently it has been shown that multi-tenant FPGAs are vulnerable to remote side-channel attacks (SCA) from malicious users, allowing them to extract secret keys without...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Digest of technical papers - IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: Krautter, Jonas, Gnad, Dennis R.E., Schellenberg, Falk, Moradi, Amir, Tahoori, Mehdi B.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.11.2019
Subjects:
Cryptography
Field programmable gate arrays
Power demand
System-on-chip
Timing
Voltage measurement
ISSN:1558-2434
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Dynamic and partial reconfiguration together with hardware parallelism make FPGAs attractive as virtualized accelerators. However, recently it has been shown that multi-tenant FPGAs are vulnerable to remote side-channel attacks (SCA) from malicious users, allowing them to extract secret keys without a logical connection to the victim core. Typical mitigations against such attacks are hiding and masking schemes, to increase attackers' efforts in terms of side-channel measurements. However, they require significant efforts and tailoring for a specific algorithm, hardware implementation and mapping. In this paper, we show a hiding countermeasure against voltage-based SCA that can be integrated into any implementation, without requiring modifications or tailoring to the protected module. We place a properly mapped Active Fence of ring oscillators between victim and attacker circuit, enabled as a feedback of an FPGA-based sensor, leading to reduced side-channel leakage. Our experimental results based on a Lattice ECP5 FPGA and an AES-128 module show that two orders of magnitude more traces are needed for a successful key recovery, while no modifications to the underlying cryptographic module are necessary.
ISSN:1558-2434
DOI:10.1109/ICCAD45719.2019.8942094