Sharing hardware designs, from descriptions to manufacturing files, is gaining momentum in academia and industry, with the first open silicon security chip becoming commercially available in 2025. Secure embedded open hardware aims to provide industry-level building blocks that meet high-quality standards for code, documentation, design, testing, and verification enabling final fabrication and security certification. Despite the increasing popularity and benefits of secure embedded open hardware, some challenges need to be addressed to achieve the goal of fabricating and certifying secure open hardware. These challenges include developing secure open hardware building blocks that meet high-quality standards, establishing automated and efficient security testing and verification methods, and ensuring the availability of tools and processes that support the secure integration of hardware building blocks into larger and more complex embedded systems.

Protection against physical attacks is a major requirement for cryptographic implementations on devices which can be accessed by attackers. Side-channel and fault injection attacks are the most common types of physical attacks. In this work we present a novel generic solution for simultaneous protection against side-channel and fault attacks with arbitrary order. We combine domain oriented masking and repetition codes in an orthogonal way and call this approach DOMREP. The resistance against side-channel attacks and fault attacks can be scaled independently of each other, for the protection against higher-order side-channel analysis and the injection of multiple faults including SIFA. We develop the generic concept of orthogonal protection, and implement the DOMREP concept on GIMLI, a round two NIST LWC competition candidate, on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. Our implementation of GIMLI is verified to be resistant against univariate first-order side-channel attacks by TVLA. The resistance against SIFA is verified by means of fault emulation of single as well as multiple bit faults. Our implementation of GIMLI achieves the expected security level according to these measurements. We also provide numbers for the area overhead for our protected implementation of GIMLI.

Persistent Fault Analysis (PFA) was introduced as a new approach to attack block ciphers at CHES 2018. Since then, it has been proven to be a powerful attack with an easy to achieve fault model which relies on the persistent alternation of constants e.g. S-Boxes. One of the main benefits, when working with PFA, comes from the perspective of an attacker: there is no need to conduct fault injections at runtime. As authenticated encryption is gaining more and more attraction from the research community e.g. the CAESAR competition, we opted to apply the principals of PFA to authenticated encryption schemes. Therefore, we decided to attack a subset of the AES based CAESAR finalists. In this work, we present a PFA of Deoxys-II, OCB and COLM. We show how to extend the original PFA to fit the needs of authenticated encryption schemes and what makes them vulnerable to PFA. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of the attacks by means of simulation.