A 286 F2/Cell Distributed Bulk-Current Sensor and Secure Flush Code Eraser Against Laser Fault Injection Attack on Cryptographic Processor
Kohei Matsuda, Tatsuya Fujii, Natsu Shoji, Takeshi Sugawara, Kazuo Sakiyama, Yu‐ichi Hayashi, Makoto Nagata, Noriyuki Miura · IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits · 2018
Laser fault injection (LFI) attack on cryptographic processors is a serious threat to information security. This paper proposes a sense-and-react countermeasure against LFI. A distributed bulk-current sensor monitors the abnormal current conduction caused by laser irradiation to a silicon substrate. The single sensor occupies only 286 F2/Cell and it is distributed across the entire cryptographic core for 100% attack detection coverage. Upon detection of LFI attack, a flush code eraser prevents a leakage of faulty ciphertext by immediately shunting the core supply path within nano-second order. In addition, the core supply during the shunting is electrically isolated from the global supply line to prevent side-channel information leakage of intermediate faulty codes. A test chip was designed and fabricated in 0.18-μm standard CMOS, integrating a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic processor with the proposed countermeasures. A protected AES processor can disable LFI attack with only +28% layout area penalty compared to an unprotected core.