Modular Fault Injector for Multiple Fault Dependability and Security Evaluations

The increasing level of integration and decreasing size of circuit elements leads to greater probabilities of operational faults. More sensible electronic devices are also more prone to external influences by energizing radiation. Additionally not only natural causes of faults are a concern of today´s chip designers. Especially smart cards are exposed to complex attacks through which an adversary tries to extract knowledge from a secured system by putting it into an undefined state. These problems make it increasingly necessary to test a new design for its fault robustness. Several previous publications propose the usage of single bit injection platforms, but the limited impact of these campaigns might not be the right choice to provide a wide fault attack coverage. This paper first introduces a new in-system fault injection strategy for automatic test pattern injection. Secondly, an approach is presented that provides an abstraction of the internal fault injection structures to a more generic high level view. Through this abstraction it is possible to support the task separation of design and test-engineers and to enable the emulation of physical attacks on circuit level. The controller´s generalized interface provides the ability to use the developed controller on different systems using the same bus system. The high level of abstraction is combinable with the advantage of high performance autonomous emulations on high end FPGA-platforms.