Intensive Analysis of Physical Parameters of Power Sensors for Remote Side-Channel Attacks

Side-channel analysis methods can reveal the secret information of digital electronic systems by analyzing the dependency between the power consumption of implemented cryptographic algorithms and the secret data. Recent studies show that it is possible to gather information about power consumption from FPGAs without any physical access. High flexibilities of modern FPGAs cause that they are used for cloud accelerator in Platform as a Service (PaaS) system; however, new serious vulnerabilities emerged for these platforms. Although there are some reports about how switching activities from one region of FPGA affect other regions, details of this technique are not analyzed. In this paper, we analyzed the strength of this kind of attack and examined the impact of geometrical and electrical parameters of the victim/attacker modules on the efficiency of this attack. We utilized a Zynq-based Xilinx platform as the device under attack. Experimental results and analyses show that the distance between the victim module and the sensor modules is not the only effective parameter on the quality of attack; the influence of the relational location of victim/attacker modules could be more considerable on the quality of attack.