Real-Time Waveform Matching with a Digitizer at 10 GS/s

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-speed, parallel waveform-matching architecture implemented on FPGA that can detect cryptographic operations in real-time at 10 GS/s, significantly surpassing previous methods in speed.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel parallel FPGA-based waveform-matching architecture capable of operating at 10 GS/s for real-time side-channel analysis detection.

Findings

Achieved real-time waveform matching at 10 GS/s.

Demonstrated 50x speedup over previous FPGA implementations.

Successfully detected AES cryptographic operations in a 1 GHz single-board computer.

Abstract

Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) requires the detection of the specific time frame Cryptographic Operations (COs) takeplace in the side-channel signal. In laboratory conditions with full control over the Device under Test (DuT), dedicated trigger signals can be implemented to indicate the start and end of COs. For real-world scenarios, waveform-matching techniques have been established which compare the side-channel signal with a template of the CO's pattern in real time to detect the CO in the side channel. State-of-the-art approaches are implemented on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). However, current waveform-matching designs are processing the samples from Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) sequentially and can only work with low sampling rates due to the limited clock speed of FPGAs. This makes it increasingly difficult to apply existing techniques on modern DuTs that are operating with clock speeds in the GHz range. In this paper, we present a parallel waveform-matching architecture that is capable of performing waveform matching at the speed of fast ADCs. We implement the proposed architecture in a high-end FPGA-based digitizer and apply it to detect AES COs from the side channel of a single-board computer operating at 1 GHz. Our implementation allows for waveform matching at 10 GS/s with high accuracy, thus offering a speedup of 50x compared to the fastest state-of-the-art implementation known to us.