FPGANeedle: Precise Remote Fault Attacks from FPGA to CPU

Mathieu Gross, Jonas Krautter, Dennis Gnad, Michael Gruber, Georg Sigl, Mehdi Tahoori

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

FPGA as general-purpose accelerators can greatly improve system efficiency and performance in cloud and edge devices alike. However, they have recently become the focus of remote attacks, such as fault and side-channel attacks from one to another user of a part of the FPGA fabric. In this work, we consider system-on-chip platforms, where an FPGA and an embedded processor core are located on the same die. We show that the embedded processor core is vulnerable to voltage drops generated by the FPGA logic. Our experiments demonstrate the possibility of compromising the data transfer from external DDR memory to the processor cache hierarchy. Furthermore, we were also able to fault and skip instructions executed on an ARM Cortex-A9 core. The FPGA based fault injection is shown precise enough to recover the secret key of an AES T-tables implementation found in the mbedTLS library.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASP-DAC 2023 - 28th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages358-364
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781450397834
DOIs
StatePublished - 16 Jan 2023
Event28th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, ASP-DAC 2023 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: 16 Jan 202319 Jan 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, ASP-DAC

Conference

Conference28th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, ASP-DAC 2023
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period16/01/2319/01/23

Keywords

  • FPGA-SoC
  • differential fault attack
  • on-chip fault attack
  • voltage drop

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