DFARPA: Differential Fault Attack Resistant Physical Design Automation

Abstract

Differential Fault Analysis (DFA), aided by sophisticated mathematical analysis techniques for ciphers and precise fault injection methodologies, has become a potent threat to cryptographic implementations. In this paper, we propose, to the best of the our knowledge, the first “DFA-aware” physical design automation methodology, that effectively mitigates the threat posed by DFA. We first develop a novel floorplan heuristic, which resists the simultaneous corruption of cipher states necessary for successful fault attack, by exploiting the fact that most fault injections are localized in practice. Our technique results in the computational complexity of the fault attack to shoot up to exhaustive search levels, making them practically infeasible. In the second part of the work, we develop a routing mechanism, which tackles more precise and costly fault injection techniques, like laser and electromagnetic guns. We propose a routing technique by integrating a specially designed ring oscillator based sensor circuit around the potential fault attack targets without incurring any performance overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by applying it on state of the art ciphers.