Optical fault injection attacks for flash memory of smartcards

Abstract

Flash memory, as a storage medium, is normally featured with high security, and thus often contains sensitive data such as passwords, cryptographic keys and other confidential contents. Optical fault injection attack is a conventional way that aims at extracting the information stored on memories. However, it has not been developed yet using this method to attack flash memories of modern micro smartcards. In this paper, the attack on flashes with optical fault injection is analyzed theoretically, and the experimental process is presented in detail. Experimental results show that some certain bytes of data can be changed into known value with optical fault injection attacks. In the read/write process, some secure information can be obtained by this approach of attack. The feature of the fault injection attack on flashes shown in the experiment can be utilized to bypass the verify operation of certain changed bytes and to guess the remaining original bytes to gain contents stored in non-volatile memories.