Fault Injection Attack Emulation Framework for Early Evaluation of IC Designs

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Fault injection attack (FIA) has become a serious threat to the confidentiality and fault tolerance of integrated circuits (ICs). Circuit designers need an effective method to evaluate the countermeasures of the IC designs against the FIAs at the design stage. To address the need, this article, based on FPGA emulation, proposes an in-circuit early evaluation framework, in which FIAs are emulated with parameterized fault models. To mimic FIAs, an efficient scan approach is proposed to inject faults at any time at any circuit nodes, while both the time and area overhead of fault injection are reduced. After the circuit design under test (CUT) is submitted to the framework, the scan chains insertion, fault generation, and fault injection are executed automatically, and the evaluation result of the CUT is generated, making the evaluation a transparent process to the designers. Based on the framework, the confidentiality and fault-tolerance evaluations are demonstrated with an information-based evaluation approach. Experiment results on a set of ISCAS89 benchmark circuits show that on average, our approach reduces the area overhead by 41.08% compared with the full scan approach and by over 20.00% compared with existing approaches. The confidentiality evaluation experiments on AES-128 and DES-56 and the fault-tolerance evaluation experiments on two CNN circuits, a RISC-V core, a Cordic core, and the float point arithmetic units show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.