CDS: An Anti-Aging Calibratable Digital Sensor for Detecting Multiple Types of Fault Injection Attacks

Fault injection attacks (FIAs) are a class of active physical attacks that inject faults into computing devices to deliberately change their intended behaviors for malicious purposes such as security feature circumvention, privilege escalation, secret data extraction by analyzing the erroneous outputs, etc. Existing sensors that detect fault injection attacks are either susceptible to aging or suffer from complicated and costly calibration process. Worse still, most sensors will fail in the presence of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) because they are built upon fixed delay chains and cannot adapt to operating voltage and frequency variations. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by presenting CDS, a delay chain based digital sensor that exploits timing variations of both detector and protected object for detecting multiple types of fault injection attacks. CDS utilizes a calibration module to solve the accuracy degradation caused by aging phenomena and a dynamic adjustment module to acclimatize itself to the need of dynamically adjusting voltage according to operating frequency in the presence of DVFS. To demonstrate its capability, we use CDS to protect the hardware accelerator of PRESENT cryptographic algorithm against voltage and laser glitching attacks. Simulation results based on HSPICE show that (i) CDS can detect 100% of voltage and temperature coordinated glitching attacks with 4.1% early warning; (ii) CDS can detect 100% of laser glitching attacks with 9.1% early warning; (iii) CDS maintains outstanding aging resistance with only 1.1% false alarm rate increase after 7 years of use.