Paper 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.