IEMI Fault Injection Method Using Continuous Sinusoidal Wave with Controlled Frequency, Amplitude, and Phase

Abstract

A fault injection attack based on an intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) using a continuous sinusoidal wave can generate a fault that is applicable for the differential fault analysis (DFA) against cryptographic module non-invasively. However, previous studies often generate multi-byte faults in the output ciphertext which are not applicable for the DFA, and they increase the analysis time dramatically. In this paper, we propose an IEMI-based fault injection method that increases the occurrence of a one-byte fault in the output ciphertext by controlling the frequency, phase, and amplitude of the injected sinusoidal wave. Specifically, we control the frequency and phase of the sinusoidal wave injected into the cryptographic module implemented with the advanced encryption standard (AES). At the same time, the number of faults of the output ciphertext is monitored so that a glitch is generated in-phase at each rising edge of the clock. At this condition, the amplitude is controlled to further increase the timing difference between the rising timing of the original clock and the overclocking occurrence timing associated with the glitch. Experimental results validated that the proposed method can increase the ratio of the number of one-byte faults to the number of faults. From the experimental results, we discuss a direction to further improve the method to maximize one-byte faults for the future study.