Ring Oscillator under Laser: Potential of PLL based Countermeasure against Laser Fault Injection

As a typical semi-invasive attack against cryptographic primitives, laser fault injection (LFI) has emerged as a serious threat for security ICs. However, very few countermeasures against LFI have been proposed in previous literature. In this paper, a logic-level countermeasure for sensing the malicious laser injection on FPGA is presented. The implemented logic consists of a digital inverter ring oscillator (RO) for detecting the frequency disturbance by laser, and a Phase Locked Loop (PLL) to monitor the frequency ripple in RO, for generating an 'alarm' signal. The effectiveness of this countermeasure is validated by a series of laser scan on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The experimental results show that the detection rate reaches up to 92.82% for protecting the registers in slice, and the countermeasure offers a significant security margin against LFIs.