Publication

Closing Leaks: Routing Against Crosstalk Side-Channel Attacks

Abstract

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.

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Key (cryptography)
A key in cryptography is a piece of information, usually a string of numbers or letters that are stored in a file, which, when processed through a cryptographic algorithm, can encode or decode cryptographic data. Based on the used method, the key can be different sizes and varieties, but in all cases, the strength of the encryption relies on the security of the key being maintained. A key's security strength is dependent on its algorithm, the size of the key, the generation of the key, and the process of key exchange.
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