Electromagnetic Fault Injection Attack Methodology against AES Hardware Implementation

Implementation attacks are a serious threat in the field of cryptography and the IoT. One particular type of implementation attack is Fault Injection Attacks (FIA). These attacks aim to modify the functionality of a certain cryptographic scheme by altering the value of certain bits or bytes inside the electronic circuit. Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is a technique that exploits these introduced faults to retrieve sensible information about the cryptographic algorithm, like the secret key. There are several ways to perform an FIA, one of them is the electromagnetic FIA, which aims to insert faults in a circuit by generating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to induce Foucault currents inside the chip that affect the components inside. In this paper, a methodology to find the optimal locations to perform an electromagnetic FIA and test it in two circuits is presented: The first one is an implementation of a single S-Box of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm and the second one is a full implementation of the AES, both on an Artix-7 FPGA. Both examples show that inserting several types of faults that the DFA literature uses to break the cipher is possible.