Parametric Trojans for Fault-Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware

Raghavan Kumar; Philipp Jovanovic; Wayne Burleson; Ilia Polian

Paper 2014/783

Parametric Trojans for Fault-Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware

Raghavan Kumar, Philipp Jovanovic, Wayne Burleson, and Ilia Polian

Abstract

We propose two extremely stealthy hardware Trojans that facilitate fault-injection attacks in cryptographic blocks. The Trojans are carefully inserted to modify the electrical characteristics of predetermined transistors in a circuit by altering parameters such as doping concentration and dopant area. These Trojans are activated with very low probability under the presence of a slightly reduced supply voltage (0.001 for 20\% $V_{dd}$ reduction). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the Trojans by utilizing them to inject faults into an ASIC implementation of the recently introduced lightweight cipher %ip PRINCE. Full circuit-level simulation followed by differential cryptanalysis demonstrate that the secret key can be reconstructed after around 5 fault-injections.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography 2014
Keywords: fault-based cryptanalysis fault injection hardware Trojans
Contact author(s): jovanovic @ fim uni-passau de
History: 2014-10-06: revised; 2014-10-06: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2014/783
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/783,
      author = {Raghavan Kumar and Philipp Jovanovic and Wayne Burleson and Ilia Polian},
      title = {Parametric Trojans for Fault-Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2014/783},
      year = {2014},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/783}
}