Detecting Laser Fault Injection Attacks via Time-to-Digital Converter Sensors

Abstract

Fault Injection Attacks (FIA) have received a lot of attention in recent years. An adversary launches such an attack to abusively take control over the system or to leak sensitive data. Laser illumination has been considered as an effective technique to launch FIA. The laser-based FIAs are mainly used when the adversary opts to target a specific location in the target circuit. However, thanks to the miniaturization of transistors and moving towards smaller feature size, even small laser spots may illuminate more than one gate; making the attack more detectable when the circuitries are equipped with embedded fault detection mechanisms such as digital sensors. In this paper, we use timeto-digital convertors, aka digital sensors, to detect the laser shots. We show that by embedding these digital sensors in the target circuitry, the IR drop caused by the laser illumination can be sensed with a high accuracy. An alarm will be raised when the fault is detected. The simulation results show the high accuracy of the proposed scheme in detecting laser-based FIAs.

(Adversarial) Electromagnetic Disturbance in the Industry

“…This sensor design can also detect local EM-measurement probes when they are placed near the IC. The time to digital detector [47] also allows to detect the targeted laser shots [54] and can be used in safety applications [48]. The glitch detector [20] approach requires the delay chain to be tuned for each technology and operating voltage.…”

“…Requires tuning Also detects Self looped D-flip flop based design [50] × − Hogge phase detector [53] design × − Flip flop duplication based approach [52] × BBI Sensor coil-based approach [46] ✓ EM-measurement probes Time to Digital Conversion (TDC) [47] ✓ Laser shots (See HOST'22 paper [54]) Glitch detector [20] ✓ Voltage and clock glitches PLL-based approach [51] ✓ Clock and voltage glitching…”

DELFINES: Detecting Laser Fault Injection Attacks via Digital Sensors

“…A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) [1]. Compared to the conference version, this paper includes (1) Evaluating the efficiency of our LFIA detection scheme in a wide range of operating conditions; (2) A complete discussion on the proposed fault model and its impact on the target chip; (3) An algorithm to fine-tune the minimum current required to inject the fault in all considered operating conditions; (4) An extensive discussion on the impact of circuit layout on FIA, overhead of the proposed method and its detection latency; (5) Extracting the sensitivity of the digital sensor to the voltage variations.…”

Parity Check Based Fault Detection against Timing Fault Injection Attacks

“…Two main types of countermeasures against timing FIAs have been proposed, sensorbased countermeasure [11,12] and information-based countermeasure [13,14]. Sensorbased countermeasures deploy analog/digital sensors, which are integrated into the target circuits, to detect the disturbance of the clock system.…”