Powerhammering through Glitch Amplification – Attacks and Mitigation

Kaspar Mätas, Tuan La, Khoa Pham, Dirk Koch

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

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Abstract

Recent work on FPGA hardware security showed a substantial potential risk through power-hammering, which uses high switching activity in order to create excessive dynamic power loads. Virtually all present power-hammering attack scenarios are based on some kind of ring oscillators for which mitigation strategies exist. In this paper, we use a different strategy to create excessive dynamic power consumption: glitch amplification. By carefully designing XOR trees, fast switching wires can be implemented that, while driving high fan-out nets, can draw enough power to crash an FPGA. In addition to the attack (which is crashing an Ultra96 board), we will present a scanner for detecting malicious glitch amplifying FPGA designs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 28th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, FCCM 2020
Pages65-69
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728158037
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 28th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, FCCM 2020

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