Recent Attacks and Defenses on FPGA-based Systems

Abstract

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a kind of programmable chip that is widely used in many areas, including automotive electronics, medical devices, military and consumer electronics, and is gaining more popularity. Unlike the application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) design, an FPGA-based system has its own supply-chain model and design flow, which brings interesting security and trust challenges. In this survey, we review the security and trust issues related to FPGA-based systems from the market perspective, where we model the market with the following parties: FPGA vendors, foundries, IP vendors, EDA tool vendors, FPGA-based system developers, and end-users. For each party, we show the security and trust problems they need to be aware of and the associated solutions that are available. We also discuss some challenges and opportunities in the security and trust of FPGA-based systems used in large-scale cloud and datacenters.