Fault Injection Attack
Fault injection attacks induce computational errors during cryptographic execution (clock glitches, voltage spikes, laser beams) and exploit the faulty outputs to recover keys.
Purpose
They assess a cryptographic device’s resistance to active faults and are a key security evaluation item for smart cards and HSMs.
Mechanism
Single-bit or single-byte faults are injected at chosen moments; correct and faulty output pairs are collected, and differential fault analysis (DFA) recovers the key from the error propagation. A fault in the last AES round can recover the full key.
Use cases
- Smart-card security assessment
- HSM fault-resistance testing
- RSA-CRT fault attacks