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.
Authors
- Xin Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9061-6930)
- Qingni Shen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0605-6043)
- Zhonghai Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1268-836X)
- Yansong Gao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6029-5064)
- Trevor E. Carlson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8742-134X)
- Yi Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0173-7306)
- Zhi Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3604-5369)
- Jiajun Zou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1393-0692)
Institutions
- National University of Singapore (SG)
- The University of Western Australia (AU)
- Peking University (CN)
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
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00