Compiler-based Countermeasure Against Fault Attacks

International audiencePhysical attacks especially fault attacks represent one themajor threats against embedded systems. In the state ofthe art, software countermeasures against fault attacks areeither applied at the source code level where it will verylikely be removed at compilation time, or at assembly levelwhere several transformations need to be performed on theassembly code and lead to considerable overheads both interms of code size and execution time. This paper presentsthe use of compiler techniques to efficiently automate theapplication of software countermeasures against instruction-skip fault attacks. We propose a modied LLVM compilerthat considers our security objectives throughout the compi-lation process. Experimental results illustrate the effective-ness of this approach on AES implementations running onan ARM-based microcontroller in terms of security overheadcompared to existing solutions