Improved Techniques for Sensing Intra-Device Side Channel Leakage

Abstract

Side channels which introduce intra-device circuit module information leakage or functional influence are of concern for the security and trust of many applications, such as multi-tenant and multi-level security single FPGA designs. Previous works utilized a sensor co-located on the same FPGA with a target module which was able to detect side channel voltage variations. We build on this by creating a sensor with more programmability and sensitivity resulting in improved recovery of bit patterns from an isolated target. We demonstrate for the first time the recovery of an unknown target frequency and data pattern length in a multi-user FPGA side channel attack. We also show increased sensitivity over previously developed voltage sensors enabling data recovery with fewer samples.