Title :
High-precision self-characterization for the LUT burn-in information leakage threat
Author :
Zick, Kenneth M. ; Sen Li ; French, Mark
Author_Institution :
Inf. Sci. Inst., Univ. of Southern California, Arlington, VA, USA
Abstract :
Information security in FPGAs is at risk; during system operation, data and usage patterns can potentially get imprinted into a chip´s physical characteristics, allowing an attacker to later recover intellectual property or cryptographic secrets. Can “data burn-in” vulnerabilities in FPGAs be characterized at low cost? Specifically, can slight shifts in path delays due to burn-in be measured with enough precision? This paper contributes methods for self-characterization of delay changes using novel isolation of key FPGA transistors, improved clock sweeping, and enhanced estimation from launch-andcapture data. Hardware experiments on 2048 Xilinx Kintex-7 paths demonstrate measurement precision of 30-60 femtoseconds, which is more than 10× finer than previous self-characterization results. Further, results show that unintentional burn-in of FPGA LUT contents does indeed occur and can in some cases be detected within a single week, highlighting the need to deploy countermeasures.
Keywords :
field programmable gate arrays; table lookup; FPGA LUT contents; FPGA transistors; LUT burn-in information leakage threat; Xilinx Kintex-7 paths; clock sweeping; launch-and-capture data; self-characterization; Clocks; Delays; Field programmable gate arrays; Table lookup; Temperature measurement; Temperature sensors; Transistors; FPGA; Wear out; aging; data burn-in; data imprinting; information leakage; self-characterization;
Conference_Titel :
Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2014 24th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Munich
DOI :
10.1109/FPL.2014.6927475