Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/783
Parametric Trojans for Fault-Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware
Raghavan Kumar and Philipp Jovanovic and 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.
Category / Keywords: fault-based cryptanalysis, fault injection, hardware Trojans
Original Publication (with minor differences): Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography 2014
Date: received 2 Oct 2014, last revised 6 Oct 2014
Contact author: jovanovic at fim uni-passau de
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Version: 20141006:214220 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2014/783
[ Cryptology ePrint archive ]