An Energy-Efficient Trusted FSM Design Technique to Thwart Fault Injection and Trojan Attacks

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Finite state machine (FSM) is a crucial component in most of the digital designs as it controls entire functionality of the system. In case an FSM is vulnerable from setup time violation based fault injection (STVFI) and Trojan attacks, the design becomes untrustable. The existing techniques are inefficient to control unauthorized access to all states from the above attacks and require significant overhead. Therefore, we propose a new energy-efficient trusted FSM design technique that effectively neutralizes the STVFI and Trojan attacks. We also introduce a new metric to identify all possible vulnerable transitions from the fault injection attacks. Further, a new light-weight vulnerabilities mitigation technique is proposed that protects the design from above attacks. The proposed mitigation technique comprises a trusted FSM design algorithm followed by an energy-efficient vulnerabilities mitigation architecture that only allows the access of reachable-set of present state to prevent unauthorized access. The simulation results on the FSMs of AES and RSA encryption modules show that the proposed metric identifies all possible vulnerable transitions, whereas proposed architecture reduces 38.7%, 47.4%, and 60.9% area, power and delay respectively over the existing AVFSM framework.