Fault attacks on two software countermeasures

Nicolas Moro (1, 2) , Karine Heydemann (1) , Amine Dehbaoui (3) , Bruno Robisson (2) , Emmanuelle Encrenaz (1)

1 ALSOC - Architecture et Logiciels pour Systèmes Embarqués sur Puce
2 Laboratoire Systèmes et Architectures Sécurisés (LSAS)
3 SERMA - SERMA Technologies

Injection of transient faults can be used as a way to attack embedded systems. On embedded processors such as microcontrollers, several studies showed that such a transient fault injection could corrupt either the data loads from the memory or the assembly instructions executed by the circuit. Some countermeasure schemes which rely on temporal redundancy have been proposed to handle this issue. Among them, several schemes add this redundancy at assembly instruction level. In this paper, we perform a practical evaluation for two of those countermeasure schemes by using a pulsed electromagnetic fault injection process on a 32-bit microcontroller.

Mots clés: microcontroller; fault injection; instruction skip; assembly; countermeasure

Domaines: Systèmes embarqués; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Nicolas Moro, Karine Heydemann, Amine Dehbaoui, Bruno Robisson, Emmanuelle Encrenaz. Fault attacks on two software countermeasures. TRUDEVICE 2014, May 2014, Paderborn, Germany. ⟨emse-00998988⟩