Date of Award

2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Yu, Chansu

Subject Headings

Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering

Abstract

This thesis proposes clock-glitch fault injection technique to inject glitches into the clock signal running in a microcontroller unit and studying its effects on different assembly level instructions. It focusses mainly on the effect of clock glitches over the execution, sub-execution and pre-execution cycles of the test instructions and also finds the delay between the actual position of glitch insertion and the trigger being set for the glitch insertion. The instructions used in this work are provided by Atmel which classifies them according to their type of operation. These instructions are here further grouped depending on the number of clock cycles they require for their execution. Each group of instructions are tested for their behavior towards clock glitches being injected at different places in and surrounding their execution cycle. This thesis utilizes the ChipWhisperer-Lite board (CW1173) for performing the whole experiment by controlling the target device, providing clock as well as clock glitches with appropriate properties at appropriate position to the target device. The Atmel AVR XMEGA 128D4U is used as the target device (CW303) that uses an external clock of frequency 7.37MHz generated by the main board. The Capture software, provided by the ChipWhisperer, is used for establishing the hardware connection between the main board and the target board. The clock glitches are designed and triggered through the Capture software.

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