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Sidechannel attacks on the bitstream encryption mechanism of Altera Stratix II: Tools and Resources
facilitating blackbox analysis using software reverseengineering Buy this Article
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Authors: Amir Moradi Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany to your organization
2013 Article
David Oswald Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
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Christof Paar Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Pawel Swierczynski Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany TOC Service:
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· Proceeding
FPGA '13 Proceedings of the ACM/SIGDA international symposium on Field programmable gate Upcoming Conference:
arrays FPGA '17
Pages 91100
ACM New York, NY, USA ©2013 Share:
table of contents ISBN: 9781450318877 doi>10.1145/2435264.2435282 |
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In order to protect FPGA designs against IP theft and related issues such as product cloning, all major FPGA manufacturers offer a
mechanism to encrypt the bitstream used to configure the FPGA. From a mathematical point of view, the employed encryption algorithms,
e.g., AES or 3DES, are highly secure. However, recently it has been shown that the bitstream encryption feature of several FPGA product
lines is susceptible to sidechannel attacks that monitor the power consumption of the cryptographic module. In this paper, we present
the first successful attack on the bitstream encryption of the Altera Stratix II FPGA. To this end, we reverseengineered the details of the
proprietary and unpublished Stratix II bitstream encryption scheme from the Quartus II software. Using this knowledge, we demonstrate
that the full 128bit AES key of a Stratix II can be recovered by means of sidechannel analysis with 30,000 measurements, which can be
acquired in less than three hours. The complete bitstream of a Stratix II that is (seemingly) protected by the bitstream encryption feature
can hence fall into the hands of a competitor or criminal possibly implying systemwide damage if confidential information such as
proprietary encryption schemes or keys programmed into the FPGA are extracted. In addition to lost IP, reprogramming the attacked FPGA
with modified code, for instance, to secretly plant a hardware trojan, is a particularly dangerous scenario for many securitycritical
applications.
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