In today’s world of complex electronic systems, the security of integrated circuits has become a major concern. Hardware attack methods are becoming less expensive and more easily accessible. Failure to address hardware security vulnerabilities leaves a chip open to threats such as data corruption, denial of service, and the leakage of assets and design secrets. These assets may include cryptographic keys, sensitive user information, passwords, biometrics, configuration bits, and firmware.

Fault injection is an attack method that is gaining concern as a simple yet powerful form of attack. It involves intentionally injecting faults into a device to cause unexpected behavior, bypassing chip security measures. In other words, successful fault injection attacks usually lead to the corruption of controller or datapath values in the chip. This corrupted data can be propagated throughout the device, and depending on the location and timing of the injected faults, can help extract sensitive information stored inside the chip. Faults can occur in the form of bit flips in registers or memory, transient interconnect voltages, clock disturbances, supply voltage disturbances, or permanent interconnect changes.