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Closing leaks: Routing against crosstalk side-channel attacks

Seifoori, Z ; Sharif University of Technology | 2020

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  1. Type of Document: Article
  2. DOI: 10.1145/3373087.3375319
  3. Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc , 2020
  4. Abstract:
  5. This paper presents an extension to PathFinder FPGA routing algorithm, which enables it to deliver FPGA designs free from risks of crosstalk attacks. Crosstalk side-channel attacks are a real threat in large designs assembled from various IPs, where some IPs are provided by trusted and some by untrusted sources. It suffices that a ring-oscillator based sensor is conveniently routed next to a signal that carries secret information (for instance, a cryptographic key), for this information to possibly get leaked. To address this security concern, we apply several different strategies and evaluate them on benchmark circuits from Verilog-to-Routing tool suite. Our experiments show that, for a quite conservative scenario where 10-20% of all design nets are carrying sensitive information, the crosstalk-attack-aware router ensures that no information leaks at a very small penalty: 1.58-7.69% increase in minimum routing channel width and 0.12-1.18% increase in critical path delay, on average. In comparison, in an AES-128 cryptographic core, less than 5% of nets carry the key or the intermediate state values of interest to an attacker, making it highly likely that the overhead for obtaining a secure design is, in practice, even smaller. © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s)
  6. Keywords:
  7. Crosstalk ; Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) ; Integrated circuit design ; Logic gates ; Benchmark circuit ; Critical path delays ; Cryptographic key ; FPGA routing algorithms ; Intermediate state ; Routing channels ; Secret information ; Sensitive informations ; Side channel attack
  8. Source: 2020 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGA 2020, 23 February 2020 through 25 February 2020 ; 2020 , Pages 197-203
  9. URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373087.3375319