Cross-Layer EM Fault Injection Assessment Framework

Hanqiu Wang1, Ruochen Dai1, Tuba Yavuz1, Xiaolong Guo2, Orlando Arias3, Dean Sullivan4, Siqi Dai1, Honggang Yu1, Michael Lee1, Domenic Forte1, Shuo Wang1
1University of Florida, 2Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Kansas State University, 3University of Massachusetts Lowell, 4University of New Hampshire


Abstract

Threats posed by both power and Electromagnetic (EM) fault injection (FI) are widely investigated in integrated circuit (IC) security. These fault injection attacks exploit the physical behavior of transistors to induce unintended behaviors in circuits. In recent years, researchers have started to model and simulate both EM and power fault injection and their impacts. However, most research fails to perform cross-domain analysis from the transistor level to the gate level, then to the RT level, and finally to the system level. We, therefore, propose a cross-layer power and EMFI evaluation framework that helps assess the impact of EM/Power FI from the bottom-up. Our framework takes information from all layers in the IC design process into consideration and uses SPICE simulation to emulate the fault induced by EM/Power spikes. We further propose EMFI register bitflip probability equations to quantifiable characterize and verify our results. Finally, we prove the effectiveness of our approach using a range of system-level benchmarks and our register bitflip probability matches closely with the SPICE simulation result.