Abstract
Evaluating embedded systems vulnerability to faults injection attacks has gained importance in recent years due to the rising threats they bring to chips security. The task is particularly important for micro-controllers since they have lower resistance to fault attacks compared to hardware-based cryptosystems. This paper reviews recent embedded fault injection simulators from literature and presents an embedded high-level fault injection mechanism based on a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). The approach aims to be architecture-independent and portable to 32-bit micro-controllers and embedded processors. The proposed mechanism, primarily targets realistic fault attack scenarios on memory locations, is adapted to timed and event-based fault injection. A Differential Fault Attack (DFA) was mounted on a popular ARM-based micro-controller running FreeRTOS to illustrate the proposed mechanism. The aim is also to bridge the embedded fault injection simulation mechanism efficiently to a computer-based cryptanalysis and to highlight the importance of physically protecting the memory and integrating data-specific countermeasures.
Highlights
AND BACKGROUNDIn the Internet of Things era, personal and sensitive data exchanges have been made common between embedded systems
An ARM-based microcontroller (Cortex-M4 core) was used where an Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) was embedded to manage the fault injection mechanism according to received parameters from a computer-based cryptanalysis program applying an Fault Analysis (FA) attack scenario
FreeRTOS which is a class of RTOS designed to be small enough to run on a microcontroller it is not limited to microcontroller applications
Summary
In the Internet of Things era, personal and sensitive data exchanges have been made common between embedded systems. In a fault attack scenario, an attacker, with a physical access to a device, running a known program, tries to perturb its operation to induce faults using laser beam, voltage glitch, under powering, clock glitching, electromagnetic emissions, heating, etc., and analyses the output to retrieve the secret data. Research on FA techniques has been very active in both academic and industrial communities in the past twenty years and has revealed many exploitable design weaknesses for almost all cryptosystems families [6]. This has contributed to introducing new design practices to secure implementations against fault attacks for hardware designs [7] as well as software for embedded processors [8]
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