Electrical and Electronics Commons^™

Critical Information Technology On Fpgas Through Unique Device Specific Keys, Miles E. Mcgee

Theses and Dissertations

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are being used for military and other sensitive applications, the threat of an adversary attacking these devices is an ever present danger. While having the ability to be reconfigured is helpful for development, it also poses the risk of its hardware design being cloned. Static random access memory (SRAM) FPGA's are the most common type of FPGA used in industry. Every time an SRAM-FPGA is powered up, its configuration must be downloaded. If an adversary is able to obtain that configuration, they can clone sensitive designs to other FPGAs. A technique that can be used …