FPGA Trust Zone: Incorporating trust and reliability into FPGA designs

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel methodology FPGA Trust Zone (FTZ) to incorporate security into the design cycle to detect and isolate anomalies such as Hardware Trojans in the FPGA fabric. Anomalies are identified using violation to spatial correlation of process variation in FPGA fabric. Anomalies are isolated using Xilinx Isolation Design Flow (IDF) methodology. FTZ helps identify and partition the FPGA into areas that are devoid of anomalies and thus, assists to run designs securely and reliably even in an anomaly-infected FPGA. FTZ also assists IDF to select trustworthy areas for implementing isolated designs and trusted routes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FTZ for AES and RC5 designs on Xilinx Virtex-7 and Atrix-7 FPGAs.