Skip to content
Open access

Design methodology of clock signal manipulation detectors in FPGAs and ASICs to strengthen vulnerable cryptosystems against fault injection

Aug 2026 · International Journal of Information Security · Vol 25 · 0 citations · 33 references

TL;DR

This paper presents a methodology for designing a lightweight detection scheme for detecting fault injections by clock manipulation in hardware-oriented information encryption algorithms in both FPGAs and ASICs and shows that the scheme is able to detect 100% of both the clock signal manipulation and electromagnetic attacks, with a negligible penalty in area consumption and without frequency degradation.

Abstract

The growth of the secure Internet of Things has led, among other aspects, to the necessity of ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive user data while simultaneously adhering to stringent constraints regarding area and resource consumption. Attacks on physical implementations of cryptographic primitives are numerous and increasingly sophisticated, making the development of secure crypto-systems a challenge. This paper presents a methodology for designing a lightweight detection scheme for detecting fault injections by clock manipulation in hardware-oriented information encryption algorithms in both FPGAs and ASICs. To demonstrate its versatility and fault coverage, several experimental tests have been performed on an Artix-7 100T FPGA and a TSMC 90nm ASIC that incorporate the proposed schemes on both the standard AES block cipher and the standard Trivium stream cipher. Furthermore, its use against electromagnetic attacks has been evaluated. The experimental results on both technologies show that the scheme is able to detect 100% of both the clock signal manipulation and electromagnetic attacks, with a negligible penalty in area consumption and without frequency degradation.

Read PDF

Similar papers

Open access Sep 2026

Coupling Leakage in Theory and Practice

This work focuses on detecting (low-level) vulnerabilities in masked FPGA designs through experimental and tool-assisted evaluation and shows how to formally abstract, unveil, and mitigate such leakages, thereby enabling a security-aware FPGA design flow that spans from the behavioral to the physical level.

Nicolai Müller, Daniel Lammers, Simon Osterheider et al. · 0 citations
Review Open access Aug 2026

A Survey of AES-256 and SHA-256 Hardware Architectures on FPGA

It can be deduced that an efficient resource usage, scalability and secure hardware implementation is possible by integrating the AES-256 and SHA-256 components into a modular FPGA architecture.

V. G, Bharathi Gururaj, Mruthika N. et al. · 0 citations
Review Open access 2026

Analysis of Countermeasures Techniques Against Side-Channel Attacks on Electronic Circuits: A Review

Side-channel attacks (SCAs) exploit unintended physical leakages in digital systems, such as power consumption, electromagnetic emissions, and execution time, to extract sensitive information, including cryptographic keys. This article presents a comprehensive comparative study of several families of countermeasures, i...

Yahaya Coulibaly, Ousmane Traoré, Daouda Traoré · 0 citations
Open access Sep 2026

A Secure Logic Locking Integration Technique for AES Algorithm

The globalization of semiconductor manufacturing has increased vulnerabilities such as hardware Trojan insertion, overbuilding, reverse engineering, and intellectual property piracy. Logic locking has emerged as an effective countermeasure to protect integrated circuits using secret key activation. The Advanced Encrypt...

P. M, S. P · 0 citations
Conference Aug 2026

High-Performance Implementation of AES-128 Encryption and Decryption on FPGA Using Pipeline Architecture with UART Communication

With the growing number of sophisticated cryptographic attacks and the need for high-speed secure data communications, the design and implementation of hardware-based encryption appears inevitable. This paper aims to design a highspeed pipelined Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128) architecture using the latest 28 nm...

H. K, Nihal G. Deshakulkarni, Nimish Vihan · 0 citations
2026

Coupling Leakage in Theory and Practice - Unveiling (Post-PnR) Security Flaws in Masked FPGA-Mapped Designs

This work focuses on detecting (low-level) vulnerabilities in masked FPGA designs through experimental and tool-assisted evaluation and shows how to formally abstract, unveil, and mitigate such leakages, thereby enabling a security-aware FPGA design flow that spans from the behavioral to the physical level.

Nicolai Müller, Daniel Lammers, Simon Osterheider et al. · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.