Paper 2016/810

Fault Injection using Crowbars on Embedded Systems

Colin O'Flynn

Abstract

Causing a device to incorrectly execute an instruction or store faulty data is well-known strategy for attacking cryptographic implementations on embedded systems. One technique to generate such faults is to manipulate the supply voltage of the device. This paper introduces a novel technique to introduce those supply voltage manipulations onto existing digital systems, requiring minimal modifications to the device being attacked. This uses a crowbar to short the power supply for controlled periods of time. High-accuracy faults are demonstrated on the 8-bit AVR microcontroller, which can generate both single and multi-bit faults with high repeatability. Additionally this technique is demonstrated on a FPGA where it is capable of generating faults in both internal registers and the configuration fabric.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
fault injectionvoltage faulting
Contact author(s)
coflynn @ newae com
History
2016-08-25: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/810
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/810,
      author = {Colin O'Flynn},
      title = {Fault Injection using Crowbars on Embedded Systems},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/810},
      year = {2016},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/810}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/810}
}
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