SASEBO GIII

SASEBO (Side-channel Attack Standard Evaluation Board) is a commercially available product which is developed by AIST Japan. Although the SASEBO has a fable story, the success of the product made the SASEBO to be used among crystallographic researchers in a twinkling. Power analysis attacks are very intrusive and invasive which makes the thwarting a racking task and must be eliminated at the design stage. SASEBO product line helps the cryptography researchers to test the power analysis attacks on their designs and produce side channel resistant products. Below a snap of the latest product by AIST, SASEBO GIII is shown.

This board is equipped with a Virtex Kintex 7 325T FPGA, which is almost 10x larger than the predecessor SASEBO GII. From GII to GIII by the AIST has improved lot of characteristics such as clock speed, voltage regulators and even the price. Unlike SASEBO GII, the GIII runs at 200MHz which allows the user to test designs in more close to the operating clock speeds of vulnerable designs whereas in GII the maximum clock configuration which can be set by the control FPGA is 24MHz. GII has only a very basic voltage regulator but in GIII, 4 regulators were used. Both GII and GIII allow user to power up the device via the USB where lots of Electro Magnetic noise is haunted.  I am not going to talk about the price since it is not mentioned in RIST web site.

Programing GIII is a hectic task which requires mammoth patience. Bit file which contains the compiled design, is ~30MB large and Xilinx platform cable takes abound 15 minutes to program the flash memories which are 128MB large. However being with the state of the art, GIII offers the best experience in power analysis attacks. Few years ago it was an agony to build just the experimental setup without any guarantee about absorbing excitement.