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.