Voltage regulator assisted lightweight countermeasure against fault injection attacks

Abstract

The impeccable design of sensitive and cryptographic circuits (CC) against fault injection attacks is essential for modern data storage, communication, and computation systems that are susceptible to fault injection attacks. The robustness of a CC against voltage glitch attacks increases with an on-chip voltage regulator that considers the impact of topology and component selection on the fault injection robustness. With an emphasis on increasing the number of phases in a multiphase voltage regulator and component selection, an on-chip voltage regulator with multiphase configuration and an optimal operating point is proposed as a lightweight countermeasure to minimize injected glitches. Furthermore, an infective countermeasure is added to the on-chip multiphase voltage regulator that contaminates the computation of the cryptographic algorithm when a voltage glitch reaches to the CC. By increasing the number of phases from 1 to 16, the confrontation with fault attacks increases by 52.45%, which is equal to 91.82% if the number of phases increases to 32. Using the infective countermeasure for fault resiliency, the security-enhanced CC provides a robust and resilient solution against fault attacks that improve the security and availability of the device. Keywords voltage regulator • multiphase voltage regulator • fault injection attack • side-channel analysis • countermeasures • power glitches • infective computation • fault resilient computation

Systematic Literature Review of EM-SCA Attacks on Encryption

“…In general, the number of measurements taken for each probe configuration must be kept to a minimum for attacks utilizing extensive search techniques [134], which scan the whole chip/board at a very high resolution with various probe orientations. Several methods have been put forth in the past few years to speed up the discovery and lower acquisition costs [135,136]. Dey et al [137] used repeated measurements and averaged the collected signals to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.…”

“…According to a study by Li [157], KLEIN is side-channel resilient to first-order attacks, although it might still be susceptible to higher-order attacks. Lightweight cryptography recently gained a re-keying option that improves guarding against side-channel attacks [136,158,159]. Other important features, including EM emission, have yet to be completely observed.…”