Secure Design of Communication Networks

The paper is focused on increasing the security measures against malicious attacks by protecting hardware that exchange data. This is in contrast to studying or improving the existing methods that rely on only securing the data. We consider errors that may appear on a way between transmitting and receiving modules in different microelectronic devices and some of such errors may be injected by potential intruders (attackers). It is shown that although the known methods are sufficient they involve significant hardware resources and delays. We suggest detecting fault injection attacks through computing Hamming weights of each transmitting data combined with additional data created by a pseudo-random generator to be controlled by internal hardware of transmitting and receiving modules. Any generated number is known by the receiving and transmitting modules and it alters the final values of Hamming weights that can only be correctly recognized inside the transmitter/receiver. Our experiments have demonstrated that the proposed supplementary circuits allow the considered problem to be solved and they are very fast and moderate in resources.