Characterization of a Voltage Glitch Attack Detector for Secure Devices

Glitch attacks are often used to inject temporal faults into secure devices and devices manipulating or holding sensitive data. The main countermeasure against these kinds of attacks involves the correct design of a built-in voltage regulator. Another important countermeasure is a glitch detector circuit. Common glitch detection approaches, such as directly monitoring the power rails, can potentially find it hard to detect fast glitches, as these become harder to differentiate from noise. This paper presents the silicon test results of a voltage glitch detector circuit which, instead of monitoring the power rails, monitors the effect of a glitch on a sensitive circuit, hence reducing the risk of detecting noise as glitches.