Chapter 13
Laser Fault Injection Attack (FIA)
Fault injections are a set of active physical attacks that can be used by an adversary to make a target device function incorrectly, have unauthorized access, leak assets, and sometimes, decipher the architecture of the whole device. Laser fault injection is one of the strongest fault injection techniques. Fault injection by laser has certain advantages over the other counterparts like timing, and voltage fault injections. Timing fault injection and voltage fault injection usually affect the device globally. So, an attacker may not achieve spatial precision with these attacks. On the other hand, a laser enables an attacker to inject faults into a very specific point of interest in the target device with very high precision. In this chapter, the practical aspects of laser fault injections are described in detail. In the experiment, we demonstrate laser-induced faults in a very basic circuit on FPGA and show how to observe the faults.