Abstract
Fault attacks are a very powerful class of attacks targeting cryptographic primitives implemented on e.g., microcontrollers. These attacks are used to uncover some secret information by analysing the results of faulty computations. The faulty computations can be caused by intentional irradiation of parts of the chip with a laser beam. In order to succeed in inducing faults with a laser beam a reliable optical fault-injection environment is required and several parameters need to be chosen carefully. The main goal of this work is to show how to set up a reliable optical fault-injection environment. Therefore we examine the influence of laser beams on different microcontroller platforms in detail. We have performed several experiments like single and multiple fault injections in SRAM registers from the front side and the rear side of the chip using different laser sources. Furthermore several parameters influencing the success in order to induce optical faults are examined in detail and an approach to find laser-sensitive spots on the chip is presented. This approach increases the efficiency of optical fault attacks significantly.
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Acknowledgments
The work presented in this article has been supported by the European Commission through the ICT program TAMPRES (Tamper Resistant Sensor Node) under contract ICT-SEC-2009-5-258754.
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Appendix
Appendix
Figures  12 and 13 depict the influence of several parameters on the ability to induce faults on the PIC 16F84 from the front side and from the rear side, respectively.
Influence of the parameters (laser pulse length, laser power, z coordinate) on the ability to induce a fault at a specific position at the front side of the PICÂ 16F84.
Influence of the parameters (laser pulse length, laser power, z coordinate) on the ability to induce a fault at a specific position at the rear side of the PICÂ 16F84.
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Korak, T. (2014). Investigation of Parameters Influencing the Success of Optical Fault Attacks. In: Danger, J., Debbabi, M., Marion, JY., Garcia-Alfaro, J., Zincir Heywood, N. (eds) Foundations and Practice of Security. FPS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8352. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05302-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05302-8_9
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