Case study on multiple fault dependability and security evaluations

The increasing level of integration and decreasing size of circuit elements leads to higher probabilities of operational faults. More vulnerable electronic devices are also more prone to external influence from energizing radiation. Additionally, the concerns of chip designers include not only the natural causes of faults but also the misbehavior of chips due to “planned” attacks, as, for example, in critical security applications. In particular, smart cards are exposed to complex attacks through which an adversary attempts to extract knowledge from secured systems by provoking undefined states. These problems increase the need to test new designs for their fault robustness.This paper presents a case study on fault injection strategies. An in-system fault injection strategy for automatic test pattern injection by enabling the emulation of fault effects on the circuit level is introduced. Second, an approach is presented that provides an abstraction of the internal fault injection structures to a more generic high-level view. Through this abstraction, it is possible to help the operating system designer test a product against different fault effects without knowing how to produce this effect by a fault attack. Therefore, we implemented a modular fault injection controller that is located along with the system under test on the emulator platform.

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