Highlights from FPGA 2020

Here are a few personal highlights from the FPGA 2020 conference, which took place this week in Seaside, California. (Main photo credit: George Constantinides.)

Jakub Szefer‘s invited talk on “Thermal and Voltage Side Channels and Attacks in Cloud FPGAs” described a rather nifty side-channel through which secrets could be leaked in the context of cloud-based FPGAs. The context is that one user of an FPGA would like to transmit information secretly to the next user of the same FPGA. Jakub suggests transmitting this information via the physical temperature of the FPGA. His proposal is that if the first user would like to transmit a ‘1’, they heat up the FPGA by running a circuit that uses a lot of current, such as a ring oscillator; if they would like to transmit a ‘0’, they don’t. The second user, once they arrive, measures the temperature of…