LeakyDSP: Exploiting Digital Signal Processing Blocks to Sense Voltage Fluctuations in FPGAs

In recent years, cloud providers are dedicated to enabling FPGA multi-tenancy to improve resource utilization, but this new sharing model introduces power side-channel threats, where attackers detect voltage fluctuations from colocated circuits. This paper proposes LeakyDSP, a novel onchip sensor that maliciously configures DSP blocks to sense fine-grained voltage fluctuations but is overlooked by existing studies. Our experimental results show that LeakyDSP achieves high sensitivity to voltage fluctuations and strong robustness to different placements. Besides, we apply LeakyDSP to extract full AES keys with $25 \mathrm{k}-78 \mathrm{k}$ traces and build covert channels with a high transmission rate of 247.94 bit/s.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-06-22
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/dac63849.2025.11132492
Primary Topic
Low-power high-performance VLSI design
Type
article
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article

LeakyDSP: Exploiting Digital Signal Processing Blocks to Sense Voltage Fluctuations in FPGAs

Xin Zhang, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu, Yansong Gao et al.
Low-power high-performance VLSI design
article

LeakyDSP: Exploiting Digital Signal Processing Blocks to Sense Voltage Fluctuations in FPGAs

Xin Zhang, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu, Yansong Gao, Trevor E. Carlson, Yi Yang, Zhi Zhang, Jiajun Zou
article en

Abstract

In recent years, cloud providers are dedicated to enabling FPGA multi-tenancy to improve resource utilization, but this new sharing model introduces power side-channel threats, where attackers detect voltage fluctuations from colocated circuits. This paper proposes LeakyDSP, a novel onchip sensor that maliciously configures DSP blocks to sense fine-grained voltage fluctuations but is overlooked by existing studies. Our experimental results show that LeakyDSP achieves high sensitivity to voltage fluctuations and strong robustness to different placements. Besides, we apply LeakyDSP to extract full AES keys with $25 \mathrm{k}-78 \mathrm{k}$ traces and build covert channels with a high transmission rate of 247.94 bit/s.

National University of Singapore (SG), The University of Western Australia (AU), Peking University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 76%
Low-power high-performance VLSI design
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LeakyDSP: Exploiting Digital Signal Processing Blocks to Sense Voltage Fluctuations in FPGAs — Xin Zhang, Qingni Shen, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS