International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 06 October 2014

Raghavan Kumar, Philipp Jovanovic, Wayne Burleson, Ilia Polian
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We propose two extremely stealthy hardware Trojans that facilitate

fault-injection attacks in cryptographic blocks. The Trojans are carefully

inserted to modify the electrical characteristics of predetermined transistors

in a circuit by altering parameters such as doping concentration and dopant

area. These Trojans are activated with very low probability under the presence

of a slightly reduced supply voltage (0.001 for 20\\% $V_{dd}$ reduction). We

demonstrate the effectiveness of the Trojans by utilizing them to inject faults

into an ASIC implementation of the recently introduced lightweight cipher %ip

PRINCE. Full circuit-level simulation followed by differential cryptanalysis

demonstrate that the secret key can be reconstructed after around 5

fault-injections.

Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.