IC security evaluation against fault injection attack based on FPGA emulation

S Xu, Q Liu, T Li, H Fan - 2016 International Conference on …, 2016 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
S Xu, Q Liu, T Li, H Fan
2016 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT), 2016ieeexplore.ieee.org
Fault injection attacks (FIAs) are becoming a serious threat to the security of integrated
circuits (ICs). Circuit designers need a simple and effective method to evaluate the ability of
their IC designs against the FIAs at design stage. To address the need, this paper based on
FPGA emulation proposes a method, which mimics FIAs on a circuit design implemented on
a FPGA by instantiating a uniform architecture which can generate different fault models and
span the space of faults and inserting fault injection logic into the design. After the circuit …
Fault injection attacks (FIAs) are becoming a serious threat to the security of integrated circuits (ICs). Circuit designers need a simple and effective method to evaluate the ability of their IC designs against the FIAs at design stage. To address the need, this paper based on FPGA emulation proposes a method, which mimics FIAs on a circuit design implemented on a FPGA by instantiating a uniform architecture which can generate different fault models and span the space of faults and inserting fault injection logic into the design. After the circuit design is submitted to the emulation platform, the fault generation and injection are executed automatically, and a report about the ability of the IC design against the FIAs is generated. The method works at the circuit netlist level, leaves the source codes of the circuit design unmodified, and makes the evaluation a transparent process to the designers. The experiment with various fault models and differential fault analysis on AES-128 encryption circuit shows the effectiveness of the method.
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