FTC—A Universal Low-Overhead Fault Injection Attack Detection Solution

Abstract

Fault Injection Attacks (FIAs) have become prolific and effective methods of violating the integrity and confidentiality of integrated circuits and electronic systems. FIAs can be accomplished using clock-glitch, voltage glitch, laser, optical instruments, and electromagnetic (EM) emanation. One promising solution to detect FIAs is to use on-chip sensors to capture the attacks’ impact. However, the variety of FIAs has led to numerous custom-designed sensors for each of them, challenging the feasibility of the implementation and introducing a large overhead. This paper proposes developing a universal Fault-to-Time Converter (FTC) sensor that can effectively detect all the aforementioned FIAs while requiring minimal overhead. The FTC sensor converts the effects of faults injected by an FIA method into “time” that is measurable. Then, the “time” difference can be analyzed further to identify whether an attack has been carried out successfully. The sensor design can be easily implemented in both FPGA and ASIC platforms. Our FTC sensor implementation in FPGA platforms demonstrates that the design can effectively differentiate various FIA attack scenarios with its encoded output. The FTC sensor can also be extended to cover other fault attacks that have a similar impact on the victim device (i.e., affecting circuit timing).