Analysis of Geometrical Parameters for Remote Side-Channel Attacks on Multi-Tenant FPGAs

Considering the dependency between the power consumption of implemented cryptographic algorithms and the data being processed, side-channel analysis methods can reveal the secret information of these systems. It was previously thought that data acquisition of dynamic power needs physical access to these systems, but recent studies show, it is possible to gather information about power consumption from FPGAs without any physical access. High flexibilities of modern FPGAs cause that they are used for cloud accelerator in Platform as a Service (PaaS) system; however, new serious vulnerabilities emerged for these platforms. Although there are some reports about how switching activities from one region of FPGA affect other regions, details of this technique are not analyzed. In this paper, we analyzed the strength of this kind of attack and examined the impact of geometrical and electrical parameters of the victim/attacker modules on the efficiency of this attack. Experimental results and analyses show that the relational location, and the distance of victim/attacker modules, have considerable impacts on the quality of attack. Results of this analysis can help the FPGA manufacturer and IP developers to protect their systems against this serious attack.