%0 Journal Article
%T An Asynchronous FPGA Block with Its Tech-Mapping Algorithm Dedicated to Security Applications
%A Taha Beyrouthy
%A Laurent Fesquet
%J International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/517947
%X This paper presents an FPGA tech-mapping algorithm dedicated to security applications. The objective is to implement¡ªon a full-custom asynchronous FPGA¡ªsecured functions that need to be robust against side-channel attacks (SCAs). The paper briefly describes the architecture of this FPGA that has been designed and prototyped in CMOS 65£¿nm to target various styles of asynchronous logic including 2-phase and 4-phase communication protocols and 1-of-n data encoding. This programmable architecture is designed to be electrically balanced in order to fit the security requirements. It allows fair comparisons between different styles of asynchronous implementations. In order to illustrate the FPGA flexibility and security, a case study has been implemented in 2-phase and 4-phase Quasi-Delay-Insensitive (QDI) logic. 1. Introduction During the last decade, FPGA manufacturers have successfully reached a high level of performance in their designs. Nowadays, FPGAs are not only used as fast prototyping tools, but they also become active players as components in embedded systems [1]. Moreover, the increasing attractiveness of embedded systems has made them part of our everyday life, especially when it comes to security applications, where cryptographic algorithms and countermeasures need to be updated or changed in some cases, for instance in homeland security, e-banking, and pay-tv. Thus, it becomes very important to guarantee a high level of flexibility and security for these FPGAs, in order to make them robust against different forms of attacks which aim to illegally retrieve secret information hidden in cryptographic systems. Unlike cryptography that protects confidentiality, integrity, or secure authentication, the cryptanalysis is about the challenge to retrieve hidden information. There are no known mathematical cryptanalysis methods which can decrypt standard cryptographic algorithms like AES in a reasonable amount of time and space, assuming that the cryptanalyst has access to both plain text and encrypted messages. However, such algorithms are implemented with some physical processes that leak information. An access to this physical information makes the job of the cryptanalyst much easier. These kinds of leakage from physical processes are commonly known as side-channel leakage. Physical cryptanalysis has been demonstrated to be effective against various standard algorithms and on various platforms in recent times (FPGAs, ASICs, etc.). Researchers have shown that side-channel attacks can be mounted on standard cryptographic algorithms like DES [2], AES [3]
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijrc/2013/517947/