Fault Injection Attack

Summary

Fault Injection Attacks are physical attacks where adversaries try to inject malicious faults into a cryptographic device or system. By injecting faults, the usual behaviour of the cryptographic operations is changed and the erroneous outputs of the faults is analysed to steal secrets/keys or sensible information.

Introduction

Fault Injection Attack is a type of a Side-Channel Attack. It is a physical attack issued on a cryptographic device or a system. Adversaries inject faults to change the normal process of a cryptographic operation. By doing this and by analyzing the generated outputs, the system security features can be bypassed or the overall system behaviour can be compromised to get secret information and keys. Usually this type of attack can be done by tempering with the voltage, the clock or the electromagnetic emissions of a system. But also optical laser injection is one technique. When it comes to the actual attack, adversaries can either choose to attack the software or the hardware of a system. The injected faults are short-lived and the are used in a differential analysis for the secrets/key stealing.