Remote Side-Channel Attacks on Heterogeneous SoC

Thanks to their performance and flexibility, FPGAs are increasingly adopted for hardware acceleration on various platforms such as system on chip and cloud datacenters. Their use for commercial and industrial purposes raises concern about potential hardware security threats. By getting access to the FPGA fabric, an attacker could implement malicious logic to perform remote hardware attacks. Recently, several papers demonstrated that FPGA can be used to eavesdrop or disturb the activity of resources located within and outside the chip. In a complex SoC that contains a processor and a FPGA within the same die, we experimentally demonstrate that FPGA-based voltage sensors can eavesdrop computations running on the CPU and that advanced side-channel attacks can be conducted remotely to retrieve the secret key of a symmetric crypto-algorithm.