Does Aging Matter? The Curious Case of Fault Sensitivity Analysis
Loading...
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Subjects
Abstract
An adversary with physical access to a cryptographic
device may place the device under an external stress such as over clocking, and under-volting in order to generate erroneous outputs
based on which the keys can be retrieved. Among fault-injection
attacks, Fault Sensitivity Analysis (FSA) has received considerable
attention in recent years as in this attack the adversary does
not need to know the faulty output; rather he/she only needs
to know whether the injected fault has led to an error or not.
Although fault-injection attacks, and in particular FSA, have been
extensively studied in literature and a number of countermeasures
have been proposed to mitigate these attacks, the impact of device
aging on the success of these attacks is still an open question.
Due to aging, the specifications of transistors deviate from their
fabrication-time specification, leading to a change of circuit’s delay
over time. In this paper, we focus on the impact of aging in collision
timing attacks (one of the strongest variant of FSA attacks). The
corresponding results, realized by extensive HSpice simulations,
show that the aging-induced impacts can facilitate such an attack.
This calls for aging-resilient countermeasures that sustain the
security over the lifetime of the cryptographic devices.