Error Detection Code Efficiency for Secure Chips

The robustness of a chip designed for security-related applications depends on its capability to globally resist to various types of attacks. This paper deals with protections against non invasive or semi invasive attacks. The two main categories are attacks based on power consumption (either by monitoring the current, e.g. DPA, or by monitoring the electromagnetic emissions, i.e. EMA) and attacks based on the injection of faults during the application execution (DFA). Error detecting codes are often proposed as a basis for countermeasures against DFA. This paper discusses the influence of the choice of the code on the global robustness of the circuit, taking into account both DPA and DFA.