COUNTERMEASURE FOR PROTECTING AGAINST A FAULT INJECTION ATTACK IN A DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM

摘要

A method is provided for protecting execution of a program against a fault injection attack. In one embodiment, a portion of the program includes multiple substantially logically identical conditional operations that are executed in a sequence. An attacker must successfully inject a fault at each instance of the conditional operations to cause the program execution to reach the final state. The multiple conditional operations may ask the same question differently so that the glitch will not cause the same response from both conditional operations. Also, the program portion may make advancement from one state to the next contingent on arriving at the next state from a valid previous state. The described program portions with multiple instances of a conditional operation make a program execution more resistant to a glitch type of fault injection attack.