Asynchronous circuits sensitivity to fault injection

This paper presents an analysis of the faults sensitivity of Quasi Delay Insensitive (QDI) asynchronous circuits. Faults considered in this work can be either natural or intentional. However, fault injection attacks which consist in causing an intentional temporary dysfunction of a circuit by injecting faults in its combinational or sequential parts are of prime interest. This failure enables hackers to access protected memory areas or secret information like cryptographic keys. This work focuses on analysing the sensitivity of asynchronous circuits to fault injection. A circuit fault-sensitivity criterion is defined, which enables to point out weak parts of the circuits in order to specify hardening strategies.