Compact Protection Codes for protecting memory from malicious data and address manipulations

Abstract

Compact protection codes (CPCs) provide optimal protection against fault injections attacks on memory arrays content. Nevertheless, CPCs fail to detect errors injected into the address itself. Consequently, an adversary can write a correct data word to an erroneous address without being detected. This paper presents an efficient code, dubbed AD-CPC, which detects both data manipulations and faults injected into the address decoder. No additional redundancy bits are required and no latency is introduced. In addition, the new encoding has a negligible effect on the error masking probability of the original CPC. We provide theoretical bounds and experimental results that support these claims. We show that with r additional redundant bits every error can be detected with probability of at least 1 - 3.2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-r</sup> .