Parity Check Based Fault Detection against Timing Fault Injection Attacks

Fault injection technologies can be utilized to steal secret information inside integrated circuits (ICs), and thus cause serious information security threats. Parity check has been adopted as an efficient method against fault injection attacks. However, the contradiction between security and overhead restricts the further development and applications of parity check in fault injection detection. This paper proposes two methods, mixed-grained parity check and word recombination parity check, based on parity check for the trade-off between security and overhead. The efficiency of the proposed approaches is verified on RC5, AES, and DES encryption implementations by clock glitch attack. Compared with the traditional parity check, the fault coverage rate of the mixed-grained approach can be increased by up to 53.69% by consuming 13.2% registers more. Against the traditional parity check, the fault coverage rate of the word recombination approach can be increased by up to 47.16% by using only 2.35% register more. The proposed approaches provide IC designers with countermeasure options targeting different design skills and design specifications.