Mitigating Power Supply Glitch based Fault Attacks with Fast All-Digital Clock Modulation Circuit

This paper experimentally demonstrates that an on-chip integrated fast all-digital clock modulation (F-ADCM) circuit can be used as a countermeasure against supply glitch and temperature variations-based fault injection attacks (FIA). The F-ADCM circuit modulates clock edges in presence of DC/transient supply glitches and temperature variations to ensure correct operation of the underlying cryptographic circuit. With a testchip manufactured in 130nm CMOS process, we first demonstrate an inexpensive methodology to conduct a fault attack on hardware implementation of a 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) engine using externally controlled supply glitches. Next, we show that with F-ADCM circuit, it is no longer possible to inject supply/temperature glitch-based faults even after 10 million encryptions across varying operating conditions. Moreover, in extreme operating conditions, the F-ADCM circuit doesn't generate any clock edges, leading to complete failure of the AES encryption, indicating no exploitable faults are present.