Optical Fault Attacks on AES: A Threat in Violet

Abstract

Microprocessors are the heart of the devices we rely on every day. However, their non-volatile memory, which often contains sensitive information, can be manipulated by ultraviolet (UV) irradiation. This paper gives practical results demonstrating that the non-volatile memory can be erased with UV light by investigating the effects of UV-C light with a wavelength of 254 nm on four different depackaged microcontrollers.We demonstrate that an adversary can use this effect to attack an AES software implementation by manipulating the 256-bit S-box table. We show that if only a single byte of the table is changed, 2 500 pairs of correct and faulty encrypted inputs are sufficient to recover the key with a probability of 90 %, in case the key schedule is not modified by the attack. Furthermore, we emphasize this by presenting a practical attack on an AES implementation running on an 8-bit microcontroller. Our attack involves only a standard decapsulation procedure and the use of a low-cost UV lamp.

Thermal laser attack and high temperature heating on HfO<inf>2</inf>-based OxRAM cells

“…While Flash technology is considered secured, emerging NVM integrity has not been investigated neither under UV nor laser attacks such as in [1] or [2]. This is the reason why this work is leaning on one of this technologies security issues, which is oxide-based RRAM (OxRAM).…”

Exploring the Feasibility of Low Cost Fault Injection Attacks on Sub-threshold Devices through an Example of a 65nm AES Implementation

“…For example, in [10] the authors were able to mount a successful attack by causing temporary brown outs and glitches on the supply line of an 8-bit microcontroller. In [19], Schmidt et al attacked an implementation of AES by blanking selectively the memory where the SBoxes are held. In [16], Peacham et al describe a successful attack mounted, using laser induced fault injection, on an AES implementation in a commercial grade smart card, that did not include any countermeasures against fault attacks.…”

Fault Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Devices: Theory, Practice, and Countermeasures

“…The strong radiation directed at the silicon surface can cause the blanking of erasable EPROM and FLASH memory cells where constants needed for an algorithm execution are kept (e.g., the AES S-Boxes). Depending on the duration of the radiation process, the authors of [34] report a progressive blanking of all the memory cells as well as resetting the internal protection fuses of the microcontroller that was targeted. The authors also show that it is possible to selectively wipe out a part of the stored data in the memory by exposing only a part of the die to UV radiation.…”