How Threats Drive the Development of Secure Reconfigurable Devices

SRAM-based FPGAs are becoming an attractive target technology for the deployment of secure and cryptographic operations. Because of this, much work has been done in exposing the security vulnerabilities of reconfigurable computing devices. Direct probing, side channel, fault injection, and replay attacks are among the many that can be variously applied to steal secret configurations, keys, data, and access. Here we review the threats faced by FPGAs and propose and analyze security solutions implementable by both FPGA application designers and FPGA vendors. We also look at the particular case of configuration security and use game theory to model the attacker/defender relationship as a 2-person strategic game.