Detection of security vulnerabilities in cryptographic ICs against fault injection attacks based on compressed sensing and basis pursuit

Cryptographic integrated circuits (ICs) used to implement cryptographic algorithms have been widely applied to numerous security-critical environments nowadays. Fault injection is a powerful attack method on the cryptographic ICs, which will lead to the disclosure of secret information. Therefore, security detection under fault injection attacks has become very important. However, the existing security testing methods rely on experience to roughly judge the security of the chip through brute force testing, and they can not comprehensively locate and identify the security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect security vulnerabilities of cryptographic ICs against fault injection attacks in the form of a linear programming problem based on compressed sensing (CS) and basis pursuit. We first identify sensitive logic cells of cryptographic IC in the design stage and then apply the incoherent observation method of CS to detect the states of these sensitive logic cells under fault injection attacks. Finally, according to the observation results, the vulnerability of these sensitive logic cells under fault injection attacks can be solved through linear programming. Thus, the security vulnerabilities are identified. Simulation results on a cryptographic IC demonstrate that the proposed method is capable to accurately identify the security vulnerabilities with negligible hardware overhead and is robust to noise interference. The identification of the security vulnerabilities is of great importance to security reinforcement and security evaluation.