Remote Physical Attacks on FPGAs at the Electrical Level

This chapter discusses recent physical attacks on FPGAs, which can also be performed remotely from within the FPGA itself. Such attacks can be executed despite established secure isolation at the digital level. Although FPGAs are meant to implement digital logic, their underlying physical circuit properties can be exploited to implement special circuitry that is either sensitive to the data-dependent on-chip voltage fluctuations or can influence them. These capabilities break all previous assumptions on how secure FPGA virtualization can be implemented and lift physical fault and power analysis attacks from a local to a potentially remote attacker. This new attack type has implications on orders of magnitude more users, particularly in cloud platforms. To address this novel threat, this chapter presents countermeasures that can be deployed from the perspective of a cloud hypervisor.