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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

serious security problem about cyclone III device

WP_01033 provides an effective deterrent against counterfeiting and IP theft. In the solution, a crucial problem is to protect key (i.e. DS28E01's secrets) in altera device design's storage region from unauthorized detection. How dose altera support it?

In my opinion, there may be several ways to get the key.

1. Reverse Engineering interesting memory blocks or flip-flops initial contents from an configuration file, which is easily captured externally.

As is well known, xilinx have tools to do such work. I don't like it.

2. Through read-back or jtag boundary scan mechanism or something else to directly access device's memory blocks or filp-flops.

thanks for your help.:-P

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    15 years ago

    It's not actually clear which "serious" security probelem you're addressing in your post. WP-1033 isn't particularly related to Cyclone III. It's just suggesting a method to achieve a certain degree of copy protection for designs with unencrypted configuration bitstreams. It has been shown, that unencrypted bitstreams can be decoded in principle, so it's clear, that the solution doesn't provide "strong" cryptography.

    Encrypted configuration bitstreams are in constrast offering state-of-the-art cryptographic design security. Because they have a key storage inside the FPGA, they don't need devices like the said Maxim-Dallas chip.