Optical Fault Attacks on AES: A Threat in Violet

Authors:
Jörn-Marc Schmidt;Michael Hutter;Thomas Plos
Affiliations:
-;-;-
Venue:
FDTC '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography
Year:
2009

Citing 0
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Journal of Systems and Software

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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-Clight with a wavelength of 254nm 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 alow-cost UV lamp.