Experimental FIA Methodology Using Clock and Control Signal Modifications under Power Supply and Temperature Variations

Abstract

The security of cryptocircuits is determined not only for their mathematical formulation, but for their physical implementation. The so-called fault injection attacks, where an attacker inserts faults during the operation of the cipher to obtain a malfunction to reveal secret information, pose a serious threat for security. These attacks are also used by designers as a vehicle to detect security flaws and then protect the circuits against these kinds of attacks. In this paper, two different attack methodologies are presented based on inserting faults through the clock signal or the control signal. The optimization of the attacks is evaluated under supply voltage and temperature variation, experimentally determining the feasibility through the evaluation of different Trivium versions in 90 nm ASIC technology implementations, also considering different routing alternatives. The results show that it is possible to inject effective faults with both methodologies, improving fault efficiency if the power supply voltage decreases, which requires only half the frequency of the short pulse inserted into the clock signal to obtain a fault. The clock signal modification methodology can be extended to other NLFSR-based cryptocircuits and the control signal-based methodology can be applied to both block and stream ciphers.