Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA differential power analysis (DPA) countermeasures include:
- AES HW masking
- Rolling keys
- Authentication before decryption
UltraScale+ FPGAs allow you to break up the PDI into multiple AES encryption modules, each encrypted with its own unique key. The initial key is stored on-chip, while keys for each successive module are encrypted (wrapped) in the previous module. This feature, known as rolling keys, increases security against side-channel attacks such as differential power analysis (DPA).
AES HW masking is available in the AES engine. This additional masking countermeasure lowers the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) making DPA attacks more difficult. AES HW masking is available in all automotive-grade (XA) devices. For commercial-grade (XC) and defense-grade (XQ) device options, contact your sales team for details.When using asymmetric authentication with encryption, Spartan UltraScale+ FPGAs authenticate all encrypted configuration data before feeding the data into the AES decryptor. This prevents an attacker from loading random unauthenticated data into the AES engine to try to determine the AES key.