Communications of the ACM
Vulnerability of Cloud Service Hardware ncovered
Researchers at Germanys Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say field programmable gate arrays have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by cyber criminals.
Credit: Dennis Gnad, KIT
Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have found that field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by cyber criminals.
FPGAs are capable of assuming nearly every function of every other computer chip. They stand out because of their comparatively low current consumption, which makes them ideally suited for server farms run by cloud service providers, but also leaves open a gateway for malicious attacks.
The versatility of FPGAs enables hackers to carry out so-called side-channel attacks, in which bad actors use the energy consumption of the chip to retrieve information allowing them to break its encryption.
Said KIT researcher Jonas Krautter, "It is possible to tamper with the calculations of other customers or even to crash the chip altogether, possibly resulting in data losses."
From Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
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