"Top pick" for computer science research
Research at the Chair for Dependable Nano Computing (CDNC) honoured again

Whether in medical technology, the automotive industry or in telecommunications and signal processing. Wherever flexibility and high computing power are required, a new type of computer chip is used: field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). However, researchers have discovered that FPGAs used in cloud services as "Accelerators-as-a-Service" are vulnerable to physical side-channel and fault injection attacks. These attacks can exploit voltage fluctuations in the shared power grid to access data from other users. To prevent this, restrictions on the programming of potentially harmful bitstreams would have to be introduced.
In their paper, scientists Jonas Krautter, Dennis Gnad and Prof. Dr. Mehdi Tahoori from the Chair of Dependable Nano Computing (CDNC) at KIT have carried out an initial analysis of these necessary restrictions and proposed an approach for checking bitstreams. Their method can detect known attacker designs without falsely flagging harmless designs. The paper entitled "Mitigating electrical-level attacks towards secure multi-tenant FPGAs in the cloud", published in 2019, has now been named a Top Pick and will be published again in the journal IEEE Design and Test on November 1, 2024.

The "Top Picks" in the field of hardware security include the most important and influential most influential papers from the last six years in the fields of hardware hardware, microarchitecture and embedded security. The papers are published in the run-up to the "International Conference on Computer-Aided Design" (ICCAD) by a panel of 30 experts from publications that have already been presented which have already been presented at relevant conferences or published in specialist journals. The authors of the selected publications are then allowed to present their work to a renowned specialist audience at ICCAD. A shortlist of papers will then be invited for submission to a "Top Picks" special issue of well-known journals such as IEEE Design and Test (D&T) or Transactions on Computer-Aided Design (TCAD).

CDNC publications have already been selected as "Top Picks" in this topic area in 2019 and 2020.

More about security vulnerabilities in FPGAs: https://www.informatik.kit.edu/11147_10360.php