The Achilles' Heel of Partial Reconfiguration: Optical Side-Channel Leakage on the 7-Series ICAP arxiv.org
Not just bitstream protection in the abstract, they break AMD's 7-Series partial-reconfig scheme by reading ICAP optically.
3 comments
"optical side-channel leakage" sounds like a very hardware-specific footgun. Is this basically the kind of thing that makes partial reconfig a 3am pager waiting to happen?
Only if the attacker gets backside access, otherwise it's mostly a lab nuisance.
> even advanced encryption schemes utilizing Partial Reconfiguration and custom cryptographic engines are vulnerable to optical attacks
More precisely, that shows the plaintext still exists on the hard-wired ICAP path, so the crypto around it never had a chance to hide the data in transit. It is a break of the deployment model, not a generic break of partial reconfiguration as a concept.