Clock Glitch Fault Injection Attacks on an FPGA AES Implementation
Hailong Liu, Zhenglin Liu, Yifei Qiao, Zhaojun Lu · Journal of Electrotechnology Electrical Engineering and Management · 2017
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm has been widely used to secure communication systems. However, the encryption algorithm is vulnerable to fault injection attacks and various attack methods have been studied. Some methods are just proposed in theory and have not been validated in practice. In this paper, we actualize a fault injection attack on an FPGA AES implementation. We propose a method to generate the highly accurate clock glitch to inject faults in the encryption process. We show that if the frequency of the clock glitch is carefully selected, only 6 faulty ciphertexts are necessary to discover the secret key.