FPGA Bitstream Security Broken

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 21, 2011 @06:18AM from the your-determined-foes-rub-their-hands-gleefully dept.

NumberField writes "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."

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Re:Alright, someone help by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-21 06:34 · Score: 5, Informative

An FPGA is sort of like a PROM except that instead of memory circuits you program logic circuits into it.
If this hack allows people to reverse-engineer the chip, they can basically dump its logic diagram, which means that they could copy it. As I understand it, it's normally pretty hard to reverse-engineer a microchip, so this is a pretty significant breakthrough.