Review of fault injection mechanisms and consequences on countermeasures design

Abstract

The secret keys handled by cryptographic devices can be extracted using fault attacks associated with cryptanalysis techniques. These faults can be induced by different means such as laser exposure, voltage or clock glitches, electromagnetic perturbation, etc. This paper provides a detailed insight into the physics and mechanisms involved in several fault injection processes. The paper also highlights the difficulty to design countermeasures while even hardware duplication, usually considered as secure, has proved to show flaws against low cost fault injection means.