A tamper resistant CMOS crypto-key generation unit

The introduction of low cost invasive attacks against hardware crypto-modules has called for new directions in the protection of hardware devices. This paper introduces "intrusion awareness" as a new design methodology for tamper resistant hardware devices. In this new approach, intrusion detection is viewed as an intrinsic property of the device and management of the intrusion status information is performed at a very low level. As a consequence, it is the very intrusion attempt that renders the information useless for the attacker. A CMOS key generation unit demonstrates the soundness of this approach. In this unit, intrusion awareness is enforced by taking advantage of sample specific device properties such as on-chip capacitance distribution