Injection of transient faults using electromagnetic pulses Practical results on a cryptographic system

Amine Dehbaoui (1, 2) , Jean-Max Dutertre (1, 2) , Bruno Robisson (1, 2) , P. Orsatelli , Philippe Maurine (3) , Assia Tria (1, 2)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
2 SAS-ENSMSE - Département Systèmes et Architectures Sécurisés
3 SysMIC - Conception et Test de Systèmes MICroélectroniques

This article considers the use of magnetic pulses to inject transient faults into the calculations of a RISC micro-controller running the AES algorithm. A magnetic coil is used to generate the pulses. It induces computational faults without any physical contact with the device. The injected faults are proved to be constant (i.e. data independent) under certain experimental conditions. This behaviour, combined with the ability to choose the faulted bytes thanks to timing accuracy in the fault injection process, makes it possible to implement most of the state-of-the-art fault attack schemes.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

Amine Dehbaoui, Jean-Max Dutertre, Bruno Robisson, P. Orsatelli, Philippe Maurine, et al.. Injection of transient faults using electromagnetic pulses Practical results on a cryptographic system. ACR Cryptology ePrint Archive (2012), 2012. ⟨emse-00742850⟩