Vincent Beroulle

Voltage Glitch Attacks on Mixed-Signal Systems

Supply voltage glitches are a well-known fault injection method used to attack electronic circuits. The aim of this paper is to identify the specific threats of mixed signal systems and to provide some solutions to ensure their security. Indeed, many Systems on Chip use both analog and digital circuits but, most of the time, the security of such application is considered only from an exclusively digital or sometimes analog point of view. However, in mixed-signals systems, analog and digital solutions coexist and must be considered as a unique system to ensure the security of the whole application. In this purpose, this paper gives an overview of voltage glitch attacks effects and countermeasures for analog and digital blocks as part of Mixed-Signal SoCs (AMS-SoCs). It also emphasizes the unique behavior of mixed-signal circuits during glitch attacks and suggest some guidelines to associate efficiently analog and digital solutions to secure a mixed-signal system.

Laser-induced fault effects in security-dedicated circuits

Lasers have become one of the most efficient means to attack secure integrated systems. Actual faults or errors induced in the system depend on many parameters, including the circuit technology and the laser characteristics. Understanding the physical effects is mandatory to correctly evaluate during the design flow the potential consequences of a laser-based attack and implement efficient counter-measures. This paper presents results obtained within the LIESSE project, aiming at defining a comprehensive approach for designers. Outcomes include the definition of fault/error models at several levels of abstraction, specific CAD tools using these models and new counter-measures well-suited to thwart laser-based attacks. Actual measures on components manufactured in the new 28 nm FDSOI technology are also presented.

ESCALATION: Leveraging Logic Masking to Facilitate Path-Delay-Based Hardware Trojan Detection Methods

Hardware Trojan (HT), intellectual property (IP) piracy, and overproduction of integrated circuit (IC) are three threats that may happen in untrusted fabrication foundries. HTs are malicious circuitry changes in the IC layout. They affect side-channels (IC parameters) such as path-delay or power consumption. Therefore, HT detection methods based on side-channel analysis have been proposed. They can detect an HT only if its effects on side-channels are significant among the alteration of side-channels, caused by process1 and environment2 variations. IC design modifications at different abstraction levels have been proposed to facilitate HT detection methods after fabrication, such as modifying a circuit to make the paths3 of the circuit more sensitive to HTs. Such modifications are known as design-for-trust (DfTr). In addition, key-based modifications have been proposed to protect IPs/ICs from IP piracy and IC overproduction. This approach is known as masking or obfuscation, and it modifies a circuit such that it does not correctly work without applying a correct key. In this work, we propose a DfTr method based on leveraging the masking approach. It improves HT detection methods based on path-delay analysis. As a matter of fact, the delay of shorter paths varies less than that of longer ones. Therefore, the objective of the proposed DfTr is to generate fake short paths for nets that only belong to long paths. Our layout level experiments show that the proposed DfTr masks the functionality of circuits and, on average, increases the HT detectability of path-delay-based detection methods by 10%.