FPGA Based Countermeasures against Side Channel Attacks on Block Ciphers

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly ubiquitous. FPGAs enable hardware acceleration and reconfigurability. Any security breach or attack on critical computations occurring on an FPGA can lead to devastating consequences. Side-channel attacks have the ability to reveal secret information, such as secret keys from cryptographic circuits running on FPGAs. Power dissipation (PA), Electromagnetic (EM) radiation, fault injection (FI) and remote power dissipation (RPA) attacks are the most compelling and noninvasive side-channel attacks demonstrated on FPGAs. This paper discusses two PA attack countermeasures (QuadSeal and RFTC) and one RPA attack countermeasure (UCloD) in detail to protect FPGAs.