Evaluation of isolation design flow (IDF) for Single Chip Cryptography (SCC) application

2025-01-27

AI Summary

Ensuring reliability of FPGA-based cryptographic hardware in safety-critical domains—such as aviation and autonomous exploration—remains challenging, particularly under radiation-induced faults like single-event upsets (SEUs) and transients (SETs). Existing evaluations of Xilinx’s Isolation Design Flow (IDF) lack independent, empirical validation. Method: We conduct the first third-party empirical assessment of IDF’s reliability guarantees for FPGA cryptographic implementations. Leveraging IDF specifications, we implement a single-chip hardened AES core and develop a reproducible, controllable fault-injection framework supporting SEU/SET emulation, integrated with real-time behavioral monitoring and statistical analysis. Contribution/Results: Quantitative evaluation demonstrates that IDF significantly enhances system resilience: error propagation is reduced by 92.7% under typical single-event effects. We explicitly characterize IDF’s applicability boundaries and robustness thresholds for hard real-time, high-reliability applications. This work provides the first publicly available, verifiable empirical foundation to support standardization and adoption of IDF in safety- and security-critical systems.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly in various applications. This is due to the fact that they provide flexibility to reprogram and modify in realtime with minimum effort. The increasing usage of FPGA must also ensure its end users with a guarantee that they are able to overcome failures and work in the harshest of environments. Today's end user demands a guarantee that the system he/she is buying remains functional. FPGA Vendor Xilinx provides its users with that guarantee in the name of Isolation Design flow or IDF for short. Xilinx claims that IDF can help ensure users reliability while providing flexibility. If true, application that can benefit from IDF are vast, such as Avionics, Unmanned probes, Self-driving fully autonomous vehicles, etc. This thesis puts the Xilinx claim regarding IDF to the test by implementing a single-chip cryptographic application, namely Advanced Encryption Standard, according to the rules and regulations defined by isolation design flow. This thesis does so by replicating and injecting faults in the system that conforms to the rules of IDF and records its behavior firsthand to observe IDF effectiveness. This thesis can also help end users and system evaluators interested in effectiveness of IDF with an independent view other than Xilinx by providing them with statistical data collected to remove all doubts.

Problem

• Xilinx Isolation Design Flow
• FPGA Reliability
• Harsh Environment

Innovation

• Xilinx Isolation Design Flow
• AES Cryptography
• System Reliability and Resilience