Power supply glitch attacks: design and evaluation of detection circuits

Techniques using modification of power supplies to attack circuits do not require strong expertise or expensive equipment. Supply voltage glitches are then a serious threat to the security of electronic devices. In this paper, mechanisms involved during such attacks are analyzed and described. It is shown that timing properties of logic gates are very sensitive to power glitches and can be used to inject faults. For this reason, detection circuits which monitor timing properties of dedicated paths are designed to detect glitch attacks. To validate these solutions, a new approach based on the study of propagation delay variation is also presented. Following this approach, the performance of detection circuits can be evaluated at design level using a standard digital design flow.