Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2020/1494
Nonintrusive and Adaptive Monitoring for Locating Voltage Attacks in Virtualized FPGAs
Seyedeh Sharareh Mirzargar and Gaiėtan Renault and Andrea Guerrieri and Mirjana Stojilović
Abstract: With every new generation, high-end FPGAs are becoming richer in features and resources, making the usage model of
single-user per FPGA decreasingly cost-efficient. Although virtualized FPGAs enable multiple users to share the same
FPGA, this multi-tenancy is not employed in practice because of potential security threats, such as voltage attacks.
These attacks use power-wasting circuits to exercise excessive switching activity on the target FPGA to cause extreme voltage
fluctuations, which produce timing faults in collocated circuits or, in extreme cases, reset target FPGA. In this work, we
present the idea of automated embedding of the on-chip voltage sensors into the virtualized FPGAs and continuous
monitoring of the core voltage for suspected fluctuations caused by a voltage attacker. Our sensors are nonintrusive and
placement-adaptive because we implement them immediately after placing and routing the user design with resources that
are left unused. We devise a novel measurement technique to continuously analyze the sensor outputs and locate the
power-wasting circuits. Additionally, we are the first to use a synchronous power-wasting attacker, capable of producing
timing faults, on Xilinx 7-series FPGAs and to successfully locate it. Hence, our proposed monitoring system enables the
virtualized FPGA to identify the voltage attackers, at minimal cost, and prevent them from repeating the attack.
Category / Keywords: applications / voltage attack, multitenancy, FPGAs, power-distribution network, cloud, shell, voltage sensors, ring oscillators
Date: received 29 Nov 2020
Contact author: mirjana stojilovic at epfl ch
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Version: 20201129:191854 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2020/1494
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