Attack-Resistant Circuit Technologies for sub-5nm Secure Computing Platforms
Sanu K. Mathew · Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2022 · 2022
Cryptographic hardware accelerators and root-of-trust circuits like True-Random-Number-Generators (TRNG) and Physically-Unclonable-Functions (PUF) have become essential components of present-day secure platforms. These circuits provide an on-die boundary within which users are given assurances that data privacy and integrity is preserved during computations and transport between storage and compute elements. The focus of hardware security engineers over the past many years has been in improving performance while reducing area and power consumption of cryptographic circuits. This tidy scenario was disrupted by a spate of attacks on computing platforms reported in the past few years. These attacks employed techniques such as speculative side-channels, physical (power/electromagnetic) side-channels, voltage/clock glitching and fault-injection to extract embedded secrets such as encryption keys or access privileged sections of system memory.