Low cost solutions for secure remote reconfiguration of FPGAs

Abstract

Reconfiguration of FPGAs is becoming increasingly popular particularly in networking applications. In order to protect FPGA designs against attacks, secure reconfiguration must be performed. This paper presents efficient ASIC implementations of authenticated encryption (AE) algorithms, AES-CCM and AES-GCM, which are used in the static part of the FPGA in order to secure the reconfiguration process. Our focus on state of the art algorithms for efficient implementations leads to propose compact architectures to be used efficiently for FPGA bitstream security. Presented ASIC architectures were evaluated by using 90 and 130 nm technologies. Our comparison to previous work reveals that our architectures are more area-efficient.