SPRED: Spatially Distributed Laser Fault Injection Resilient Design

Computing systems’ hardware implementation is vulnerable to physical attacks. One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of physical attacks is laser fault injection (LFI), which can successfully compromise an embedded cryptographic implementation even with a single fault. Several countermeasures have been proposed to prevent and detect LFI attacks. However, these schemes cannot protect a multi-spot laser fault injection setup alone. Vulnerabilities can be addressed in such circumstances using a multi-layer or defense-in-depth approach. Defense-in-depth refers to implementing several independent countermeasures within a device to provide aggregated protection against various attack vectors. In this paper, we introduce a multi-layer countermeasure where the proposed approach protects an LFI attack detector against multi-spot LFI attacks. We design and simulate a spatially distributed multi-gate driven design, called SPRED, to prevent single and multi-spot LFI attacks. Simulation results show that the distribution of gates in SPRED forces an attacker to use higher laser power and a thinner wafer to inject a fault.