Innovative Conductive Mesh Structure for the Protection of Security Electronic Circuits

Modern communications are characterized by high speed and large amount of data due to the rapid advance in technology. Home appliances, automotive electronics and portable gadgets are connected to the Internet in order to facilitate communications between them. This is also the result of the humans need to keep in touch with the surrounding world. These interactions are useful as long as the information between parties is kept securely. Cryptography protects communications and stored data but the processing units must also be protected against specialized attacks, like physical intrusions. The attackers may obtain secret data and information about the cryptographic processes. This knowledge can be further used in cryptanalytic and side channel attacks.This paper proposes an innovative conductive structure used for protection of electronic circuits against intrusion attacks. This conductive structure is made of a very fine mesh and is connected to an active tamper detection circuit that analyzes the signals inside the mesh and takes the decision in case of intrusion.