1 research outputs found
Programmable RO (PRO): A Multipurpose Countermeasure against Side-channel and Fault Injection Attack
Side-channel and fault injection attacks reveal secret information by
monitoring or manipulating the physical effects of computations involving
secret variables. Circuit-level countermeasures help to deter these attacks,
and traditionally such countermeasures have been developed for each attack
vector separately. We demonstrate a multipurpose ring oscillator design -
Programmable Ring Oscillator (PRO) to address both fault attacks and
side-channel attacks in a generic, application-independent manner. PRO, as an
integrated primitive, can provide on-chip side-channel resistance, power
monitoring, and fault detection capabilities to a secure design. We present a
grid of PROs monitoring the on-chip power network to detect anomalies. Such
power anomalies may be caused by external factors such as electromagnetic fault
injection and power glitches, as well as by internal factors such as hardware
Trojans. By monitoring the frequency of the ring oscillators, we are able to
detect the on-chip power anomaly in time as well as in location. Moreover, we
show that the PROs can also inject a random noise pattern into a design's power
consumption. By randomly switching the frequency of a ring oscillator, the
resulting power-noise pattern significantly reduces the power-based
side-channel leakage of a cipher. We discuss the design of PRO and present
measurement results on a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA prototype, and we show that
side-channel and fault vulnerabilities can be addressed at a low cost by
introducing PRO to the design. We conclude that PRO can serve as an
application-independent, multipurpose countermeasure