FPGA-Rootkits Hiding Malicious Code inside the Hardware

Abstract

This paper describes the security implications of FPGAs to the trusted computing base of embedded systems. It gives an overview of different FPGA architectures and discusses the security measures and shortcoming of modern FPGAs. Furthermore it shows how an attacker can exploit this shortcoming and integrate rootkit-like code inside the FPGA. After a discussion on possible countermeasures, description on the different ways a root kit can be deployed into the FPGA is given.