Chapter 12
Voltage Glitch Attack on an FPGA AES Implementation
Fault injection attack (FIA) has proven to be a powerful technique for uncovering confidential data with a limited number of experiments and minimal effort. A device’s operation is intercepted during a fault injection attack, a type of active side-channel attack that allows attackers to access sensitive data. The attacker alters the clock, temperature, and power supply connections, uses a high-powered laser, performs EM injection, or injects a fault into the system. The output bits can be corrupted by these faults, and if they are placed carefully, they can also leak private information. Voltage glitching attack is a simple and low-cost approach for hackers and criminals to perform fault injection exploits on any accessible device. In this chapter, we demonstrate the voltage glitch fault injection attack on AES in FPGAs. We inject the voltage glitch in the FSM states of AES encryption. Using a ChipWhisperer CW305 target board, we specifically show, step by step, how to perform a voltage glitch in an AES block implemented on an FPGA and show how to fail an AES execution by applying voltage glitches that cause it to produce erroneous results during the AES encryption process.