Title
ROPAD: Enhancing the Digital Ring Oscillator Probing Attempt Detector for Protecting Irregular Data Buses<sup/>
Abstract
Microprobing is applied to intercept data from on-chip signals, such as data passing through a data bus. Hence, it allows for extracting a full dump of this data, e.g., the firmware of a microcontroller, cryptographic key material, or any other type of passing data on the physical metal lines and/or the physical cells of the data bus connected to the metal lines. It is categorized as an invasive and physical attack vector against which software measures are insufficient for protection. As a countermeasure detecting microprobing attacks and enabling appropriate protection mechanisms, we propose a new probing detector for an industrial sub-40-nm advanced process node. It is based on ring oscillators (ROs), which are formed from the data bus lines. The oscillation frequency, caused by the capacity of bus lines, is measured and compared to detect any attached microprobes. The concept is optimized for detection of placed microprobes on both regular and irregular data buses or on any other pair of lines. For this purpose, a statistics-driven decision is made to distinguish probed from not probed lines. To improve the concept for high capacitance irregular lines, a hybrid design and test time calibration is proposed and analyzed, which shows the applicability of the concept under irregular bus lines, local variations, and jittery conditions. The results show that the approach results in low false positive (FP) and false negative (FN) rate at lower overhead comparing with alternative approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TVLSI.2022.3191471
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Circuit faults,CMOS,data bus,delays,detectors,fault diagnosis,irregular bus,irregular lines,jitter resistant,microcontrollers,microprobing,microprobing detection,probes,probing detection,probing sensor,ring oscillator (RO),smart cards,security,tamper protection,variation resistant
Journal
30
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
1063-8210
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
12
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Seyed Hamidreza Moghadas100.34
Michael Pehl200.34
Georg Sigl344762.13