학술논문
In-Situ FPGA Fault Injection with Short-Circuits
Document Type
Conference
Author
Source
2024 IEEE Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE) Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE), 2024 IEEE. :1-7 Nov, 2024
Subject
Language
Abstract
Fault injection (FI) causes intentional errors in the circuit for the benefit of the attacker. These faults are created, e.g., by briefly interrupting the power supply which creates a voltage glitch. Many real-world examples emphasize the importance to protect against voltage glitches and related techniques that rely on physical proximity. Unfortunately, design and testing of countermeasures is often a laborious process such that a vulnerable combination of parameters is easily missed. Ideally, this process could be simplified without compromising assurance. To meet this need and enable per-unit testing, we propose in-situ fault injection testing by leveraging configurable Short Circuits (SCs) inside the FPGA, i.e., without external equipment. In our work, we characterize these FPGA-internal short circuits using our high-resolution Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC), study their behavior under different configurations, and compare the results against other types of power wasting circuits that have been used in the literature. We then use a configurable number of SCs to inject faults into AES inside the same FPGA. The impact of this is as follows: with a TDC and SCs, we obtain a lab-on-a-chip with fault-injection (and side-channel) capabilities that could also be used to devastating effect in multi-tenant FPGA environments in the cloud.