FTC: A Universal Sensor for Fault Injection Attack Detection
Md Rafid Muttaki, Tao Zhang, Mark Tehranipoor, Farimah Farahmandi
Abstract
Over the past two decades, fault-injection methods have evolved into very effective attacks to cause integrity or con-fidentiality violations in integrated circuits or electronic systems. Fault-injection attacks (FIAs) can be carried out using clock-glitch, voltage glitch, laser, optical instruments, electromagnetic (EM) emanation, and more. One promising solution to detect FIAs is to use on-chip sensors to capture the attacks' effect. However, having different types and techniques of FIAs enforces using the custom-designed sensors for each type of attack, which is challenging and introduces a large overhead. To address this, in this paper, we propose to develop a universal Fault-to- Time Converter (FTC) sensor that can effectively detect all the above-mentioned FIAs while requiring minimal overhead. The FTC sensor converts the effect 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. 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).