Temperature sensitive active tamper detection circuit
Daniel-Ciprian Vasile, Paul Mugur Svasta · 2017
Electronic modules designed for processing sensitive data, such as cryptographic modules, firmware solutions protected by intellectual property rights and secure communication devices, use special circuits designed for protecting these solutions from unauthorized physical access. The main components of these circuits are the conductive mesh structure, which acts as a protective cover, and the active tamper detection circuit. Besides the physical attacks, there are side channel attacks, where an attacker takes advantage of the errors produced by the logic circuits functioning in extreme conditions. When logic circuits are subject of temperatures that exceed the operational limits, they may run with faults and create proper conditions for cryptographic attacks. This paper proposes an active tamper detection circuit that analyses the temperature (and its variation gradient) of the conductive mesh. This method improves and complements the protection functions of the active tamper detection circuits.