independent in time from the detection intervening upon the non volatile memory according to the value of said variable application_number US 64155006 A description the same elements have been designated with the same reference numerals in the different drawings for clarity only those elements and method steps which are useful to the understanding of the present invention have been shown in the drawings and will be described hereafter in particular the software or hardware structure of the disturbance detectors in an integrated circuit has not been described in detail the present invention being compatible with any conventional detector similarly the programs executed by an integrated circuit of the type to which the present invention applies and the handled data have not been discussed the present invention being here again compatible with any conventional program a feature of an embodiment of the present invention is in case a fault injection be it voluntary or incidental is detected to update a variable in a volatile storage element of the integrated circuit then process this information for copying into a non volatile memory or clearing of at least the confidential data that it contains in a way decorrelated from the detection fig4 partially and very schematically shows in the form of blocks an embodiment of an integrated circuit 1 provided with a protection mechanism according to the present invention as previously circuit 1 comprises one or several hardware.