Fault Injection Attacks

Instructor 

Dr. Farimah Farahmandi is the Wally Rhines Endowed Professor in Hardware Security in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Florida

Learning Objectives

Fault injection attacks are one of the most powerful hardware attack techniques, capable of corrupting computations, bypassing security checks, and extracting secret keys from cryptographic hardware. By deliberately inducing transient or permanent faults through clock/voltage glitching, electromagnetic pulses, or invasive methods, adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities in SoCs and IP cores. Understanding these attacks is essential for engineers and researchers developing secure systems, as they highlight the limits of traditional verification and the need for robust countermeasures. This certificate provides hands-on exposure to fault injection techniques, detection methods, security property development, and emulation-based vulnerability assessment, enabling learners to analyze and defend real-world hardware against such threats.

This certificate is open to individuals working in DoD, government, or government-affiliated roles, as well as SCALE students. To register, you must be a member of the MEST group on nanoHUB, unless you are a SCALE student. To access the certificates, you must be logged in to your nanoHUB account. After your registration has been accepted, you should see the offering and your entry to the course appear on the right, where it currently says “no offerings available”.

Students will learn how fault injection attacks compromise hardware security, how to simulate and detect such attacks, and how to apply emulation-based techniques for early-stage vulnerability assessment. They will gain practical experience with fault injection on AES, TDC sensor–based detection, assertion-driven verification, and high-performance hardware emulation platforms.

This micro-certificate course is organized into a set of units described below:

• Unit 1: Fault Injection Attack on AES Cipher
  Introduces clock and voltage glitch attacks using ChipWhisperer CW305 FPGA targets. Students will perform hands-on glitching experiments on AES to observe how faults alter cryptographic outputs and compromise key security.
• Unit 2: Detection of Fault Injection Attacks Using TDC Sensor
  Covers the theory and practice of using Time-Digital Converter (TDC) sensors for detecting anomalous timing variations caused by fault injections. Students will implement TDC sensors on a Zynq SoC FPGA to detect real-time voltage glitch–based attacks.
• Unit 3: Security Property Development and Fault Injection Simulation
  Focuses on modeling non-invasive, semi-invasive, and invasive fault attacks at the gate level. Learners will develop SystemVerilog security properties and use simulation-based tools (e.g., ZOIX) to inject and analyze faults in AES designs.
• Unit 4: Hardware Emulation–based Fault Injection Vulnerability Assessment
  Provides training in assertion-based fault injection assessment using Synopsys ZeBu® emulation. Students will inject runtime hardware faults, monitor violations using SystemVerilog Assertions, and evaluate countermeasures for cryptographic IPs

Prerequisites:

• A background in RTL design and C++ programming will be helpful.

Target Audience

Designed for U.S. citizens working in the Department of War, Government, or Government-affiliated employees, industry, as well as college students and faculty. Must register with your organizational email, and will be notified of acceptance within one week of the course start date.

Biography

Mark M. Tehranipoor is currently the Intel Charles E. Young Preeminence Endowed Chair Professor in Cybersecurity and the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Florida. He is also currently serving as the Director for Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research, Director for Edaptive Computing Inc. Transition Center (ECI-TC), Co-director for the AFOSR/AFRL Center of Excellence on Enabling Cyber Defense in Analog and Mixed Signal Domain (CYAN), and Co-Director for the National Microelectronic Security Training Center (MEST). He also served as the Associate Chair for Research and Strategic Initiatives for the ECE Department from 2017-2019 and the Program Director of Cybersecurity in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering from 2019-2022. His current research projects include: hardware security and trust, electronics supply chain security, IoT security, and reliable and testable VLSI design. Dr. Tehranipoor has published numerous journal articles and refereed conference papers and has delivered more than 220+ invited talks and keynote addresses. In addition, he has 15 patents issued, and has published 13 books of which two are textbooks. His projects have been sponsored by 50+ companies and Government agencies.

Dr. Tehranipoor is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of ACM, Golden Core Member of IEEE Computer Society, and Member of ACM SIGDA. He is also a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE). He is a recipient of 14 best paper awards and nominations, the 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2014 AFOSR MURI award on Nanoscale Security, the 2008 IEEE Computer Society (CS) Meritorious Service award, the 2012 and 2017 IEEE CS Outstanding Contribution, the 2010 and 2016 IEEE TTTC/CS Most Successful Technical Event for co-founding and chairing HOST Symposium, the 2018 IEEE HOST Hall of Fame Member, the 2009 and 2014 UConn ECE Research Excellence award, the 2012 UConn SOE Outstanding Faculty Advisor award, the 2016 UF College of Engineering Excellence in Leadership award, the 2016 UF ECE Research Excellence Award, the 2020 UF’s College of Engineering Teacher/Scholar of the year award, and the 2020 UF Innovation of the Year Award.

He serves on the program committee of more than a dozen leading conferences and workshops. Prof. Tehranipoor served as the guest editor for JETTA, IEEE Design and Test of Computers, ACM JETC, and IEEE Computer Society Computing Now. He served as Program Chair of the 2019 International Test Conference (ITC), Vice-program Chair of the 2018 ITC, Program Chair of the 2007 IEEE Defect-Based Testing (DBT) workshop, 2016 IEEE International Verification and Security Workshop (IVSW), Program Chair of the 2008 IEEE Defect and Data Driven Testing (D3T) workshop, Co-program Chair of the 2008 International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems (DFTS), General Chair for D3T-2009 and DFTS-2009, and Vice-general Chair for NATW-2011, General Chair for 2008-2009, and 2021 IEEE HOST, and General Chair for 2019-2021 IEEE PAINE Conference.

Over the years, he has led a number of major initiatives in the domain of microelectronics security and trust. He co-founded the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) and served as HOST-2008 and HOST-2009 General Chair and continue to serve as Chair of the Steering Committee for HOST. He also co-founded IEEE Asian-HOST and the IEEE International Conference of Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE). Further, he co-founded the Journal on Hardware and Systems Security (HaSS) and currently serving as EIC for HaSS. He is also led development of Trust-Hub sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). He served as associate Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for IEEE Design and Test of Computers from 2012-2014. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Design and Test of Computers, JETTA, Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE), ACM Transactions for Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), IEEE Transactions on Computers, and IEEE Transactions on VLSI (TVLSI). He has served as an IEEE Distinguished Speaker and an ACM Distinguished Speaker from 2010-2013. Further, he served as an ambassador of cybersecurity for IEEE from 2016-2020.

Prior to joining University of Florida, Dr. Tehranipoor served as the founding director of the Center for Hardware Assurance, Security, and Engineering (CHASE) and the Comcast Center of Excellence in Security Innovation (CSI) at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Farimah Farahmandi is the Wally Rhines Endowed Professor in Hardware Security in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Associate Director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on hardware security verification, formal methods, fault-injection attack analysis, and post-silicon validation and debug, resulting in 7 books and over 140 publications in these fields. Dr. Farahmandi’s research has been sponsored by a variety of leading companies and government agencies. For her contributions, she is a recipient of 7 best paper and nomination awards, and was recognized with the ACM/IEEE DAC Under 40 Innovators Award (2024), the Best Assistant Professor Award at the University of Florida (2024), the Excellence in Service Award (2023), and the Excellence in Research Award (2022) from the ECE department at UF. She also received the prestigious Young Faculty Award from SRC (2022) and the NSF CAREER Award.