Paper 2021/1277
LifeLine for FPGA Protection: Obfuscated Cryptography for Real-World Security
Florian Stolz, Nils Albartus, Julian Speith, Simon Klix, Clemens Nasenberg, Aiden Gula, Marc Fyrbiak, Christof Paar, Tim Güneysu, and Russell Tessier
Abstract
Over the last decade attacks have repetitively demonstrated that bitstream protection for SRAM-based FPGAs is a persistent problem without a satisfying solution in practice. Hence, real-world hardware designs are prone to intellectual property infringement and malicious manipulation as they are not adequately protected against reverse-engineering. In this work, we first review state-of-the-art solutions from industry and academia and demonstrate their ineffectiveness with respect to reverse-engineering and design manipulation. We then describe the design and implementation of novel hardware obfuscation primitives based on the intrinsic structure of FPGAs. Based on our primitives, we design and implement LifeLine, a hardware design protection mechanism for FPGAs using hardware/software co-obfuscated cryptography. We show that LifeLine offers effective protection for a real-world adversary model, requires minimal integration effort for hardware designers, and retrofits to already deployed (and so far vulnerable) systems.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published by the IACR in TCHES 2021
- DOI
- 10.46586/tches.v2021.i4.412-446
- Keywords
- FPGA SecurityHardware ObfuscationSoftware ObfuscationReverse Engineering
- Contact author(s)
- nils albartus @ rub de
- History
- 2021-09-24: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2021/1277
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/1277,
author = {Florian Stolz and Nils Albartus and Julian Speith and Simon Klix and Clemens Nasenberg and Aiden Gula and Marc Fyrbiak and Christof Paar and Tim Güneysu and Russell Tessier},
title = {{LifeLine} for {FPGA} Protection: Obfuscated Cryptography for Real-World Security},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/1277},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.46586/tches.v2021.i4.412-446},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1277}
}
