Fault attacks, injection techniques and tools for simulation

Faults attacks are a serious threat to secure devices, because they are powerful and they can be performed with extremely cheap equipment. Resistance against fault attacks is often evaluated directly on the manufactured devices, as commercial tools supporting fault evaluation do not usually provide the level of details needed to assert the security of a device. Early identification of weak points would instead be very useful as it would allow to immediately apply the appropriate countermeasures directly at design time. Moving towards this goal, in this work, we survey existing fault attacks and techniques for injecting faults, and we analyze the suitability of existing electronic design automaton commodities for estimating resistance against fault attacks. Our exploration, which includes the type of attacks that can be simulated and the limitations of each considered simulation approach, is an initial step towards the development of a complete framework for asserting fault attack robustness. © 2015 IEEE