Countermeasures Against Fault Injection Attacks in Processors: A Review

Physical attacks pose a significant threat to the security of embedded processors, which have become an integral part of our daily lives. Processors can be vulnerable to fault injection attacks that threaten their normal and secure behavior. Such attacks can lead to serious malfunctions in applications, compromising their security and correct behavior. Therefore, it is crucial for designers and manufacturers to consider these threats while developing embedded processors. These attacks may require only a moderate level of knowledge to execute and can compromise the normal behavior of the targeted devices. These attacks can be faced by developing effective countermeasures. This paper explores the main existing countermeasures against fault injection attacks in embedded processors, to understand and implement effective solutions against those threats. Subsequently, we further investigate solutions related to RISC-V, focusing on its hardware and architecture security.