Experimental Verification of EMPA Fault Mechanism

The efficient fault injection attack (FIA) technique, electromagnetic pulse attack (EMPA), is the serious threat to the security of integrated circuits (ICs). To protect ICs against EMPA, it is necessary to understand EMPA fault mechanism. In this paper, a widely accepted hypothesis suggests that the faults are induced by the disturbances, caused by the EMPA, on the power/ground grids in ICs. The goal of this work is to verify the hypothesis by experiments. A coupling model of EMPA is first presented based on the Faraday’s law and the hypothesis. The influence of EMPA on the power/ground grids is predicted with the model. Then an experiment is designed, where inverters are used to monitor the disturbances on the power/ground grids when EMPA with various parameters is performed. A physical EMPA platform is built and a circuit with inverter chain is fabricated in 0.11um technology. The experimental results show that the disturbances on the power/ground grids are closely related to the EMPA pulses, in accordance to the prediction. The results, on the one hand, demonstrate the reasonability of the hypothesis and on the other hand reveal that the influence of EMPA on the carriers of CMOS gates in the attacked circuit should be also considered for the precise analysis about the EMPA fault mechanism.