FPGA-based Emulation Method Against Fault Injection Attacks On Integrated Circuits

With the process of social informatization and networking,the integrated circuits(ICs)and their security has gradually become the basis of information technology and information security.In recent years,integrated circuit security has been threatened by fault injection attacks(FIAs).FIAs are aggressive and greatly harmful,for they force the circuit to leak security data by inducing faults into the circuit.It is very important for the improvement of the chips' security to mimic FIAs at design stage to expose the defects of the design and to evaluate the ability of the design against the attacks.The available methods mainly include chip tests,software-based simulation and hardware-based emulation.A lot of cost is always needed to do chip tests.It also takes a long time for a method based on software to obtain the results of mimicking the FIAs.And the existing solutions based on emulation still have some problems like high resource overhead,dependency on specific function in some FPGAs,dependency on specific tools because of the excessive usage of scripting,modification of the circuit's source code,limited research on the circuit security evaluation and so on.To address these problems,this paper proposes a flexible method which mimic FIAs with low resource overhead and high efficiency.The hardware platform is based on generic FPGA,and python is used to develop software needed.The method proposed firstly establishes a unify fault model framework,which is used to generate various custom fault models and get rid of the limitation to the fault models.At the same time,it also introduces a file named fault data list and reduces the impact of fault injection mechanism on the process of generating fault data.Then,hardware architecture for fault injection is proposed based on the FPGA,scan design and netlist modification.Scan chains and fault injection management module are inserted into the netlist of the circuit,and the process of mimicking the FIAs is automatically carried out.Finally,a process of security evaluation against FIAs is realized based on the existing fault analysis methods.And a new evaluation method is proposed using the statistics on the outputs of the circuit.The experiment with the proposed method on AES-128 encryption circuit shows the platform takes 272 D flip-flops and 634 LUTs and are cost-effective.Security report given by the platform points out that the key of AES is cracked,and the AES encryption circuit is very sensitive to flip faults and needs to be strengthen against the attacks such as electromagnetic fault injection attacks which induce flip faults more easily.The report also shows that it can improve the probability of recovering security data by increasing the strength of FIAs and changing the plaintext.