Implications of Physical Fault Injections on Single Chip Motes

Abstract

Single-chip motes are wireless sensor nodes that integrate computation, communication, power and sensing on a single chip. We consider the security threats these novel devices are subject to when employed in safety-critical applications. Fault injection attacks are a prominent form of physical attacks that pose a threat to the normal and secure functioning of targeted devices, potentially compromising their intended behavior. These attacks have been studied mainly on commercial off-the-shelf devices which rely on external components such as crystal oscillators and passives. Such external components are absent from single-chip motes, resulting in a uniquely different attack surface compared to commercial systems. In this paper, we first survey the features of the common fault injection methods, and then study and compare their implications on single-chip motes.