FPGA Bitstream Security Broken

[erek]

Researchers in Germany released a pair of papers documenting severe power analysis vulnerabilities in the bitstream encryption of multiple Xilinx FPGAs. The problem exposes products using FPGAs to cloning, hardware Trojan insertion, and reverse engineering. Unfortunately, there is no easy downloadable fix, as hardware changes are required. These papers are also a reminder that differential power analysis (DPA) remains a potent threat to unprotected hardware devices. On the FPGA front, only Actel seems to be tackling the DPA issue so far, although their FPGAs are much smaller than Xilinx's.


Slashdot @ http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/07/21/1753217/FPGA-Bitstream-Security-Broken


...could be bad news for FPGA miners alike...

[1715487531]

1715487531

[notme]

Researchers in Germany released a pair of papers documenting severe power analysis vulnerabilities in the bitstream encryption of multiple Xilinx FPGAs. The problem exposes products using FPGAs to cloning, hardware Trojan insertion, and reverse engineering. Unfortunately, there is no easy downloadable fix, as hardware changes are required. These papers are also a reminder that differential power analysis (DPA) remains a potent threat to unprotected hardware devices. On the FPGA front, only Actel seems to be tackling the DPA issue so far, although their FPGAs are much smaller than Xilinx's.


Slashdot @ http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/07/21/1753217/FPGA-Bitstream-Security-Broken


...could be bad news for FPGA miners alike...

Not really, unless you're looking to profit from a proprietary design... All it means is someone can copy the design off the hardware.  Since the prominent FPGA design is open source, this is not really a threat.

[fpgaminer]

The highest performance, working FPGA miner is currently based on Altera FPGAs. Altera did a fantastic job protecting their FPGAs; they are absolutely 100% immune to all bitstream encryption attacks ... mostly because Altera FPGAs don't actually have encrypted bitstreams 

Jokes aside, thank you for sharing the news!

[Silverpike]

Researchers in Germany released a pair of papers documenting severe power analysis vulnerabilities in the bitstream encryption of multiple Xilinx FPGAs. The problem exposes products using FPGAs to cloning, hardware Trojan insertion, and reverse engineering. Unfortunately, there is no easy downloadable fix, as hardware changes are required. These papers are also a reminder that differential power analysis (DPA) remains a potent threat to unprotected hardware devices. On the FPGA front, only Actel seems to be tackling the DPA issue so far, although their FPGAs are much smaller than Xilinx's.


Slashdot @ http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/07/21/1753217/FPGA-Bitstream-Security-Broken


...could be bad news for FPGA miners alike...

This has no impact on FPGA miners, because the designs are completely open source.  You can't steal something that's already open.

[erek]

oh