Paper 2023/1195

PicoEMP: A Low-Cost EMFI Platform Compared to BBI and Voltage Fault Injection using TDC and External VCC Measurements

Colin O'Flynn, Dalhousie University
Abstract

Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) has been demonstrated to be useful for both academic and industrial research. Due to the dangerous voltages involved, most work is done with commercial tools. This paper introduces a safety-focused low-cost and open-source design that can be built for less than \$50 using only off-the-shelf parts. The paper also introduces an iCE40 based Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC), which is used to visualize the glitch inserted by the EMFI tool. This demonstrates the internal voltage perturbations between voltage, body biasing injection (BBI), and EMFI all result in similar waveforms. In addition, a link between an easy-to-measure external voltage measurement and the internal measurement is made. Attacks are also made on a hardware AES engine, and a soft-core RISC-V processor, all running on the same iCE40 FPGA. The platform is used to demonstrate several aspects of fault injection, including that the spatial positioning of the EMFI probe can impact the glitch strength, and that the same physical device may require widely different glitch parameters when running different designs.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. FDTC 2023
Keywords
fault injectiontoolsopen-source hardwareelectromagnetic fault injectionEMFI
Contact author(s)
coflynn @ dal ca
History
2023-08-07: approved
2023-08-06: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1195
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1195,
      author = {Colin O'Flynn},
      title = {{PicoEMP}: A Low-Cost {EMFI} Platform Compared to {BBI} and Voltage Fault Injection using {TDC} and External {VCC} Measurements},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1195},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1195}
}
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