An FPGA-Based Open-Source Hardware-Software Framework for Side-Channel Security Research

TL;DR

This paper presents an open-source FPGA-based hardware-software framework designed to facilitate side-channel analysis research on IoT-class systems, enabling easier development and evaluation of security countermeasures.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, open-source SoC framework with tools and features specifically for SCA research, streamlining the process for researchers and designers.

Findings

Provides an IoT-class SoC with RISC-V CPU and debug infrastructure

Includes scripts and tools for deploying SCA attacks and countermeasures

Supports the development and testing of SCA security measures

Abstract

Attacks based on side-channel analysis (SCA) pose a severe security threat to modern computing platforms, further exacerbated on IoT devices by their pervasiveness and handling of private and critical data. Designing SCA-resistant computing platforms requires a significant additional effort in the early stages of the IoT devices' life cycle, which is severely constrained by strict time-to-market deadlines and tight budgets. This manuscript introduces a hardware-software framework meant for SCA research on FPGA targets. It delivers an IoT-class system-on-chip (SoC) that includes a RISC-V CPU, provides observability and controllability through an ad-hoc debug infrastructure to facilitate SCA attacks and evaluate the platform's security, and streamlines the deployment of SCA countermeasures through dedicated hardware and software features such as a DFS actuator and FreeRTOS support. The open-source release of the framework includes the SoC, the scripts to configure the computing platform, compile a target application, and assess the SCA security, as well as a suite of state-of-the-art attacks and countermeasures. The goal is to foster its adoption and novel developments in the field, empowering designers and researchers to focus on studying SCA countermeasures and Attacks while relying on a sound and stable hardware-software platform as the foundation for their research.