Leveraging On-Chip Voltage Regulators Against Fault Injection Attacks

The security implications of utilizing an on-chip voltage regulator as a countermeasure against fault injection attacks are investigated in this paper. The effect of the size of the capacitors and number of phases of the voltage regulator on the resilience of a cryptographic circuit against fault injection attacks are analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed method in counteracting voltage glitch attacks is demonstrated with extensive simulations on the S-box of an advanced encryption standard~(AES) cryptographic algorithm. Using a single phase on-chip voltage regulator, the number of faults generated by a voltage glitch attack is reduced by 5.45% as compared to unprotected S-box, and by 91.82% when number of phases increases to 32.