An Electromagnetic Fault Injection Sensor using Hogge Phase-Detector

Abstract

Fault injection attack against embedded devices has attracted much attention in recent years. As a highly efficient fault injection, EM fault injection (EMFI) outperforms other injection means owing to its outstanding penetration capability in incurring local faults into security ICs. In this paper, we present an all digital countermeasure for detecting the on-the-fly EMFI attempts in silicon chips. The proposed logic consists of a watchdog ring-oscillator (RO), and a Hogge Phase Detector (PD) for sensing the frequency turbulence induced by the ongoing EMFIs. Experimental validation on Xilinx FPGA Virtex-5 FPGA reports a fault detection rate of 93.15% and a failure rate of 0.0069, with negligible overhead. A significant security margin for alerting the injection attempt is also noticeable. The technique is versatile and can be integrated in any VLSI design for its lightweight and all digital architecture, especially for the security-critical scenarios, such as the endpoints of Internet-of-Things (IoT).