A Fault Attack Resistant Method for RISC-V Based on Interrupt Handlers and Instruction Extensions

This paper proposes an anti-fault injection attack method for data flow errors of RISC-V processor, which occur when the processor is under fault attacks with clock glitches. To reduce the cost of countermeasure, the method is developed in a hardware and software co-designed manner, based on hardware fault detection and software fault response and recovery. A lightweight clock glitch detection circuit is exploited to detect the glitches and generate the alarm signal. Then the alarm signal triggers the software interrupt handler and the fault recovery interrupt service program executes to restore data. To realize the fault recovery scheme, the minimum micro-architecture modifications of the RISC-V processor and instruction extensions are proposed. The experimental results show that the countermeasure can effectively restore the data and only increases the logic resource usage of the processor by about 3% without affecting the performance.