FPGA-oriented moving target defense against security threats from malicious FPGA tools

The imbalance relationship between FPGA hardware/software providers and FPGA users challenges the assurance of secure design on FPGAs. Existing efforts on FPGA security primarily focus on reverse engineering the downloaded FPGA configuration, retrieving the authentication code or crypto key stored on the embedded memory in FPGAs, and countermeasures for the security threats above. In this work, we investigate new security threats from malicious FPGA tools, and identify stealthy attacks that could occur during FPGA deployment. To address those attacks, we exploit the principles of moving target defense (MTD) and propose a FPGA-oriented MTD (FOMTD) method. Our method is composed of three defense lines, which are formed by an improved user constraint file, random selection of design replicas, and runtime submodule assembling, respectively. The FPGA emulation results show that the proposed FOMTD method reduces the hardware Trojan hit rate by 60% over the baseline, at the cost of 10.76% more power consumption.