ROPAD: Enhancing the Digital Ring Oscillator Probing Attempt Detector for Protecting Irregular Data Buses

Microprobing is applied to intercept data from on-chip signals, such as data passing through a data bus. Hence, it allows for extracting a full dump of this data, e.g., the firmware of a microcontroller, cryptographic key material, or any other type of passing data on the physical metal lines and/or the physical cells of the data bus connected to the metal lines. It is categorized as an invasive and physical attack vector against which software measures are insufficient for protection. As a countermeasure detecting microprobing attacks and enabling appropriate protection mechanisms, we propose a new probing detector for an industrial sub-40-nm advanced process node. It is based on ring oscillators (ROs), which are formed from the data bus lines. The oscillation frequency, caused by the capacity of bus lines, is measured and compared to detect any attached microprobes. The concept is optimized for detection of placed microprobes on both regular and irregular data buses or on any other pair of lines. For this purpose, a statistics-driven decision is made to distinguish probed from not probed lines. To improve the concept for high capacitance irregular lines, a hybrid design and test time calibration is proposed and analyzed, which shows the applicability of the concept under irregular bus lines, local variations, and jittery conditions. The results show that the approach results in low false positive (FP) and false negative (FN) rate at lower overhead comparing with alternative approaches.