The Achilles' Heel of Partial Reconfiguration: Optical Side-Channel Leakage on the 7-Series ICAP
Researchers tested an AMD key encryption scheme for FPGAs using Partial Reconfiguration and found it vulnerable to optical side-channel attacks. They used Photon Emission Microscopy (PEM) to locate the configuration interface and Electro-Optical Probing (EOP) to extract plain-text data, proving that hard-wired interfaces leak sensitive information despite encryption.