Simulation and Analysis of Intentional EMI Attack Against Power Delivery Network of Ring Oscillator Based True Random Number Generator

This article presents a simulation and analysis of an intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) attack targeting the power delivery network (PDN) of a ring-oscillator (RO)-based true random number generator (TRNG). The jitter of ROs is a source of randomness, and the randomness is key for maintaining the hardware security of the device. When the jitter is reduced due to the injected noise, the randomness of the TRNG is degraded. In this article, the simulation setup of IEMI attack is proposed. When the noise associated with IEMI injection to the PDN is delivered to the ROs and the locking occurs, the output response of the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{R O}$</tex> is affected. This phenomenon is simulated and validated via measurement. Also, the simulated outputs of the TRNG are evaluated. The proposed simulation is capable of predicting the randomness degradation under the IEMI attack.