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Clock glitch fault injection attack on an FPGA-based non-autonomous chaotic oscillator

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Abstract

Chaos-based true random bit generators have been demonstrated in many studies to be feasible and secure for crypto-system applications. In this work, we demonstrate that an FPGA-based non-autonomous chaotic oscillator, used as a true random number generator, can be compromised via cryptanalysis attacks. First, we realize non-autonomous chaotic oscillator (previously implemented only in analog form) on a modular FPGA platform. The oscillator architecture is simplified to eliminate the Sin function and is described in details in VHDL. Then, we propose chaotic oscillator attacking system including clock glitch generator to compromise the oscillator by injecting glitches on function clock. The parameters and positions of those glitches are carefully determined to achieve a successful attack. The experimental results show that the system is attacked, and the generated glitched bit-streams are distorted, unlike the bit-streams generated without glitching. The randomness of the generated bit-streams is checked using the NIST test tool.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Talal Bonny & Qassim Nasir

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  1. Talal Bonny
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  2. Qassim Nasir
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Correspondence to Talal Bonny.

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Bonny, T., Nasir, Q. Clock glitch fault injection attack on an FPGA-based non-autonomous chaotic oscillator. Nonlinear Dyn 96, 2087–2101 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-019-04907-9

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