Review of Side Channel Attacks and Countermeasures of FPGA Based Systems

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based systems are widely used in a range of applications including cryptography and machine learning model due to the rapid rate of hardware realizations at low cost. However, FPGAs based systems are subjected to vulnerabilities due to the side channel attacks. Recent studies have shown that vulnerabilities such as power leakage and long wires leakage can be utilised to extract secret key or information from the FPGAs. Which becomes a critical security concern for the data and Machine Learning model executing on the cloud computing service and data centres that includes FPGAs in their systems. Malicious users in these systems may utilised these vulnerabilities to perform a power side channel attacks to get confidential information or to create a malicious shutdown attack towards the systems. In this review paper, we presented the most recent side channel attacks focusing on power leakage and long wire leakage. Moreover, we present the countermeasures for protecting FPGAs from these attacks.