Detecting power attacks on reconfigurable hardware

We present a novel framework to detect power attacks on crypto-systems implemented on reconfigurable hardware. We monitor the device supply voltage with a ring oscillator-based on-chip power monitor. In order to detect the insertion of power measurement circuits onto a device´s power rail, a power attack detection strategy taking into account abnormal supply voltages and power rail resistance values is developed. Our strategy is integrated into an on-chip attack detector. The entire framework implementation only takes 3300 LUTs of a Spartan-6 LX45 FPGA, which is 12% of the total area available. Our results on an AES and RSA crypto-system show that our attack detection framework can reach false-positive and false-negative rates as low as 0% over all our test cases if proper operating margins are set.