Paper 2016/810 Original: eprint.iacr.org/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.
History
2016-08-25: last updated
2016-08-25: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/810
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/810}
}
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