SASEBO-GIII: A hardware security evaluation board equipped with a 28-nm FPGA

The SASEBO-GIII board equipped with a 28-nm FPGA was developed for security evaluation against side-channel attacks (SCAs) and various other threats. SCAs are performed to extract a secret key inside a cryptographic module by analyzing its power consumption, electromagnetic radiation and other physical parameters. Since an increasing number of current consumer electronic devices provide hardware-accelerated cryptographic functionality for data encryption, device authentication, and so forth, SCAs are considered to be a serious problem in the electronics market. While previous SASEBO models mainly target SCA evaluation of a single cryptographic core, they are nevertheless insufficient for testing the security of integrated systems that consist of any combination of cryptographic, network, control and other modules. Providing high processing power with the latest Kintex-7 FPGA and considerable expandability with ANSI-standard FMC connectors, SASEBO-GIII is suitable for prototyping a wide variety of systems, such as home information appliances, content distribution systems and dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) systems, and offers a convenient environment for studying security issues in such integrated systems, for example, hardware trojans and counterfeit electronics. The configuration of the Kintex-7 FPGA is controlled by the other FPGA (Spartan-6), and therefore a user can verify the security of various types of device configuration processes, for example, DPR through ICAP or SelectMAP interfaces as well as though standard configuration interfaces such as BPI and JTAG. This paper presents the detailed architecture and features of SASEBO-GIII, and shows the results of an electromagnetic SCA attack against the standard AES block cipher implemented on the Kintex-7 FPGA.