"Intel Introduces Protection Against Physical Fault Injection Attacks"

Intel recently announced its release of Tunable Replica Circuit (TRC), a new fault injection protection in the 12th generation Intel Core processors meant to identify non-invasive physical glitch attacks and electromagnetic fault injections.  Intel stated that TRC is designed to complement existing software mitigations, and it relies on hardware-based sensors to detect dynamic variations in circuits and can be fine-tuned to detect only timing violations that are caused by an attack.  Intel noted that by changing the monitoring configuration and building the infrastructure to leverage the sensitivity of the TRC to fault injection attacks, the circuit was tuned for security applications.  Intel stated that TRC is meant to deliver protections against certain types of physical attacks and can be calibrated for specific digital circuits to detect timing failures caused by multiple environmental conditions, including clock, electromagnetic, temperature, or voltage glitches.  Intel noted that TRC consists of a launching flip-flop (FF), a tunable delay chain, and a capture FF.  The delay chain, Intel explains, can be calibrated per device to ensure that TRC correctly determines the right timing of each cycle.  Intel noted that calibration is the key to eliminating false positives and that it has created a feedback-based calibration flow to help eliminate both false positives and false negatives.  Intel says it has applied the new protection to the Platform Controller Hub (PCH), a chipset that is isolated from the CPU and which is meant to improve the security of a system’s root of trust.  The company noted that because it is a digital device, TRC can be easily ported from one process node to another and uses a smaller die area than building both an analog clock monitor and analog voltage level detector.  

SecurityWeek reports: "Intel Introduces Protection Against Physical Fault Injection Attacks"