Optical Probing of Readback CRC Bus

Summary

By leveraging a physical optical side channel, an attacker could recover plaintext configuration data from encrypted bitstreams. AMD recommends maintaining good physical security practices and keeping  systems closed unless needed for maintenance and repairs by authorized personnel.

 Affected Products and Mitigation

The testing by the academics was done on AMD Xilinx 7 series FPGAs. This is a physical back side attack and is outside of the threat model for AMD 7-series FPGAs.

Acknowledgement 

AMD thanks  Jonas Sander, Anja Rabich, Nick Mahling, Qifan Wang, Felix Maurer, David Oswald, and Thomas Eisenbarth for reporting this issue and engaging in coordinated vulnerability disclosure. 

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