A team at the Horst Hortz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, has just published an analysis (http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/391.pdf) of successful side-channel attacks to recover encryption keys in the Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 FPGAs from Xilinx. Similar attacks have been used against older generations of FPGAs using the Triple-DES encryption standard from the federal government, but this is the first such attack in semiconductors using the newer Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES.

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