Industry Expert Blogs

At GOMACTech 2022, Scott Best, director of anti-tamper security technology at Rambus will present “Advanced Packaging Technique to Mitigate Fault-Injection Attacks.” Cryptographic processing can be disrupted by state-of-the-art fault-injection techniques. Such attacks can result in recovery of secret key material by an adversary, and even allow execution of adversarial code. While circuit techniques can be implemented to mitigate these attacks, such techniques are less effective in protecting circuits built with large geometry transistors, used for example in radiation-hardened applications.

One limitation of these fault-injection attacks is that the lasers employed use the infrared spectrum, which is transparent to silicon but absorbed by the ordinary metal used for circuit-interconnect and power distribution. For that reason, fault-injection attacks typically assault a circuit from the back, substrate-side of the chip, where there is typically no metallization. Scott Best will present a reliable, low-cost anti-tamper technique that adds fault-injection shielding metal to the reverse-side of a chip. The proposed techniques utilize modern packaging technology that is fully compatible with and non-disruptive to all semiconductor wafer-processing foundries.

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