We propose FPGA-Patch, the first-of-its-kind defense that leverages automated program repair concepts to thwart power side-channel attacks on cloud FPGAs. FPGA-Patch generates isofunctional variants of the target hardware by injecting faults and finding transformations that eliminate failure. The obtained variants display different hardware characteristics, ensuring a maximal diversity in power traces once dynamically swapped at run-time. Yet, FPGA-Patch forces the variants to have enough similarity, enabling bitstream compression and minimizing dynamic exchange costs. Considering AES running on AMD/Xilinx FPGA, FPGA-Patch increases the attacker's effort by three orders of magnitude, while preserving the performance of AES and a minimal area overhead of 14.2%.
@article{arxiv.2304.02510,
title = {FPGA-Patch: Mitigating Remote Side-Channel Attacks on FPGAs using Dynamic Patch Generation},
author = {Mahya Morid Ahmadi and Lilas Alrahis and Ozgur Sinanoglu and Muhammad Shafique},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.02510},
year = {2023}
}