Voltage regulator assisted lightweight countermeasure against fault injection attacks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lightweight on-chip multiphase voltage regulator with an infective countermeasure to enhance the robustness of cryptographic circuits against fault injection attacks, significantly increasing fault resistance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multiphase voltage regulator design with an infective countermeasure, improving fault attack resilience in cryptographic circuits.

Findings

Increasing phases from 1 to 16 improves fault resistance by 52.45%.

Using 32 phases increases fault resistance by 91.82%.

The combined approach enhances security and device availability.

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.