AN 759: Using Secure Boot in Intel® Arria® 10 SoC Devices

ID 683060
Date 3/29/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

Can the HPS perform decryption of the boot image instead of the FPGA CSS?

The HPS portion of the SoC does not support AES operations. It can only perform public key-based authentication. The HPS can, however, push the boot image into the FPGA CSS and perform the same decryption used in the FPGA configuration flow.

When decryption is complete, the CSS returns the image to the HPS and the HPS uses that image as the boot image. The HPS and FPGA share the same AES root key which is stored in efuse. The CSS uses a simple key derivation function, AES (efuse or BBRAM key, #constant) for the HPS and FPGA configuration images.