Detecting Voltage Glitch Attacks on Secure Devices

Secure devices are often subject to attacks and behavioural analysis in order to inject faults on them and/or extract otherwise secret information. Glitch attacks, sudden changes on the power supply rails, are a common technique used to inject faults on electronic devices. Detectors are designed to catch these attacks. As the detectors become more efficient, new glitches that are harder to detect arise. Common glitch detection approaches, such as directly monitoring the power rails, can potentially find it hard to detect fast glitches, as these become harder to differentiate from noise. This paper proposes a design which, instead of monitoring the power rails, monitors the effect of a glitch on a sensitive circuit, hence reducing the risk of detecting noise as glitches.