Non-invasive Trigger-free Fault Injection Method Based on Intentional Electromagnetic Interference

Abstract—This paper presents a new type of fault injec-tion method based on intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI), which causes information leakage from cryptographic devices without disrupting their operations or damaging their physical structures. The basic principle is to transmit a sinusoidal EM wave via a power/communication cable or an antenna. The IEMI-based fault injection method is performed at a distance from the target module through many filtering components, such as a voltage regulator, without leaving any hard evidence of the attack. It can also be applied under the condition that there is no trigger signal synchronized with the cryptographic operation. We demonstrate the potential capability of the IEMI-based fault injection attacks through an experiment using an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) module implemented on a standard FPGA board. The exper-imental result shows that generating effective faults is feasible and such IEMI-based fault injection is available for a typical differential fault analysis on AES. Keywords-fault injection attacks; intentional electromagnetic interference; AES; non-invasive fault injection I