IACR News item: 27 February 2015
Lionel Rivière, Zakaria Najm, Pablo Rauzy, Jean-Luc Danger, Julien Bringer, Laurent Sauvage
ePrint ReportIn particular, fault injection attacks revealed vulnerabilities on the data and the control flow
allowing an attacker to break cryptographic or secured algorithms implementations.
While many research studies concentrated on successful attacks on the data flow, only a few targets the instruction flow.
In this paper, we focus on electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) on the control flow,
especially on the instruction cache.
We target the very widespread (smartphones, tablets, settop-boxes, health-industry monitors and sensors, etc.) ARMv7-M architecture.
We describe a practical EMFI platform and present a methodology providing high control level and high reproducibility over fault injections.
Indeed, we observe that a precise fault model occurs in up to 96\\% of the cases.
We then characterize and exhibit this practical fault model on the cache that is not yet considered in the literature.
We comprehensively describe its effects and show how it can be used to reproduce well known fault attacks.
Finally, we describe how it can benefits attackers to mount new powerful attacks or simplify existing ones.
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