Body Biasing Injection Attacks in Practice

Abstract

As security constraints are becoming more and more important, even for low-cost and low-power devices, new attacks and countermeasures are constantly proposed. Following this trend, Body Bias Injection (BBI) was introduced a few years ago. This new fault injection method consists in applying a high voltage pulse on the circuit substrate to induce faults. This paper presents an advanced evaluation bench allowing to perform BBI attacks with a good repeatability to evaluate the sensitivity of various circuits to this new threat. The moderate cost of this setup offers the opportunity for every electronic laboratory to use this new attack method and evaluate its effect on various devices. In addition, the physical effects of such attacks are described and a more accurate attack model is given.