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Design Security

Confidentiality, Authenticity and Monitoring for Physical Attacks

Design security builds on top of our secure hardware platform to provide confidentiality and authenticity to your design while monitoring the environment for physical attacks. Additionally, our secure manufacturing flow can extend to your manufacturing facilities anywhere in the world by adopting our secure production programming solution.

Differential Power Analysis (DPA)

The process for programming or loading FPGAs needs to be side channel-resistant regardless of whether they are nonvolatile or SRAM FPGAs. Starting with the introduction of our SmartFusion® 2 and IGLOO® 2 FPGAs in 2013, have built side channel resistance into our FPGA programming operations, regardless of whether those operations occur in a lab or via remote update mechanisms.

Licensed DPA Countermeasures Graphic

Anti-Tamper

Actively monitoring the environment is another technique to protect an FPGA design from physical attack. There are 32 tamper flags that you can monitor; here are just some of the tamper detectors on PolarFire®, RT PolarFire and PolarFire SoC FPGA devices:

Locks

The PolarFire family of FPGAs devices contains a variety of locks, allowing you to tailor access rights to your application profile. You can temporarily unlock user lock bits using the appropriate passcode assigned to that lock, and they can remain unlocked until the next device reset, JTAG reset or power-down. Any permanent change to locks must come from a bitstream or the most important lock bits, and from an antitamper perspective, you can also use parity bits to detect any loss of integrity. These bits are monitored continuously during run-time and generate a tamper detection flag immediately if a tamper event is detected. 

Secure Programming

Using Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and secure production programming software provides the following three key user benefits. 

  • The ability to encrypt and provision an FPGA in a less-trusted manufacturing environment
  • Control over how many devices you program and therefore how many systems you build
  • The ability to audit the manufacturing process in a cryptographically controlled manner

You can network your manufacturing site for job file transfer or you can burn a CD/DVD and sneaker net the job file to the manufacturing site.

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