A First Report on Electromagnetic and Power Analysis Attacks against a 28-nm FPGA Device

Two types of side-channel attack (SCA)— electromagnetic analysis (EMA) and correlation power analysis (CPA)—are conducted on the latest 28-nm field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device. SCA exploits leakage of physical information, such as power consumption or electromagnetic (EM) radiation, from a cryptographic device to extract that device’s secret key. Owing to remarkable advances in large-scale integration (LSI) technology factors such as reduced core voltages and use of on-chip capacitors, power analysis of cryptographic devices has become increasingly difficult; consequently, the threat of EMA to cryptographic devices has become the greater concern. To assess the feasibility of SCA against state-of-the-art LSI technology, we developed the Side-channel Attack Standard Evaluation Board (SASEBO)-GIII, which is equipped with Xilinx Inc.'s 28-nm Kintex-7 FPGA device. To demonstrate the suitability of SASEBO-GIII for SCA research, we performed EMA and CPA against advanced encryption standard (AES) circuits on the Kintex-7 FPGA and compared the results with those on the 65-nm Virtex-5 FPGA from our previous SASEBO-GII evaluation platform. EMA successfully extracted the entire secret key from the Kintex-7 FPGA on the SASEBOGIII with fewer wave traces than were needed for the Virtex-5 FPGA on the SASEBO-GII; furthermore, EMA against Kintex-7 FPGA required fewer wave traces than did CPA against the same device. In this paper, we explain the features of SASEBO-GIII, provide experimental EMA and CPA results, and discuss the risk posed by EMA and CPA to leading-edge LSI technology.