FPGA-Based Testbed for Fault Injection on SHA-256

Abstract

In real world applications, cryptographic algorithms are implemented in hardware or software on specific devices. An active attacker may inject faults during the computation process and careful analysis of faulty results can potentially leak secret information. These kinds of attacks known as fault injection attacks may have devastating effects in the field of hardware and embedded cryptography. This research proposes a partial implementation of SHA-256 along with an onboard fault injection circuit implemented on an FPGA. The proposed fault injection circuit is used to generate glitches in the clock to induce a setup time violation in the circuit and thereby produce error(s) in the output. The main objective of this research is to study the viability of fault injection using the clock glitches on the SHA-256.