Paper 2023/1647

Who Watches the Watchers: Attacking Glitch Detection Circuits

Amund Askeland, University of Bergen, Nasjonal Sikkerhetsmyndighet
Svetla Nikova, KU Leuven
Ventzislav Nikov, NXP (Belgium)
Abstract

Over the last decades, fault injection attacks have been demonstrated to be an effective method for breaking the security of electronic devices. Some types of fault injection attacks, like clock and voltage glitching, require very few resources by the attacker and are practical and simple to execute. A cost-effective countermeasure against these attacks is the use of a detector circuit which detects timing violations - the underlying effect that glitch attacks rely on. In this paper, we take a closer look at three examples of such detectors that have been presented in the literature. We demonstrate four high-speed clock glitching attacks, which successfully inject faults in systems, where detectors have been implemented to protect. The attacks remain unnoticed by the glitch detectors. We verify our attacks with practical experiments on an FPGA.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info
Published by the IACR in TCHES 2024
Keywords
fault analysisglitch detectorsclock glitching attacks
Contact author(s)
amund askeland @ uib no
svetla nikova @ esat kuleuven be
venci nikov @ gmail com
History
2023-10-26: approved
2023-10-24: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1647
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1647,
      author = {Amund Askeland and Svetla Nikova and Ventzislav Nikov},
      title = {Who Watches the Watchers: Attacking Glitch Detection Circuits},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1647},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1647}
}
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