A survey on security features in modern FPGAs

Security is a major challenge for the design on FPGAs. This one applies to different levels: IP protection, information confidentiality and denial of service. To assist the application designer in this purpose, FPGA vendors provide dedicated features, which address potential security breaches of their devices. In this paper, after setting up a complete FPGA threat model, we compare relevant functionalities of the most advanced products of Altera, Microsemi and Xilinx. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the security features embedded on the current FPGAs address the threat model.