Power Analysis of FPGAs: How Practical is the Attack?

Recent developments in information technologies made the secure transmission of digital data a critical design point. Large data flows have to be exchanged securely and involve encryption rates that sometimes may require hardware implementations. Reprogrammable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays are highly attractive solutions for hardware implementations of encryption algorithms and several papers underline their growing performances and flexibility for any digital processing application. Although cryptosystem designers frequently assume that secret parameters will be manipulated in closed reliable computing environments, Kocher et al. stressed in 1998 that actual computers and microchips leak information correlated with the data handled. Side-channel attacks based on time, power and electromagnetic measurements were successfully applied to the smart card technology, but we have no knowledge of any attempt to implement them against FPGAs. This paper examines how monitori...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: FPL
• Authors: François-Xavier Standaert, Loïc van Oldeneel tot Oldenzeel, David Samyde, Jean-Jacques Quisquater
• Keywords: FPL 2003, Hardware Implementations, Programmable Gate Arrays, Side-channel Attacks