An Introduction to Fault Injection Attacks
Jean-Max Dutertre, Jessy Clédière · 2025
Fault injection attacks target the operations performed by integrated circuits. They consist of disrupting the operation by introducing calculation errors and erroneous behavior for attack purposes. The RowHammer attack is an original attack targeting DRAM memories used as RAM memory by complex circuits ( Systems on Chip ). These memories are characterized by their high writing and reading speed, which explains their adoption in all systems using SoCs or modern micro-processors. Synchronization tools play a vital role in fault injection attacks. Without these tools, it is difficult to imagine carrying out relevant attacks on products that are intended to be secure. This chapter presents two concrete examples of fault injection attacks on electronic components. The first attack is aimed at manipulating a secret key in the Data Encryption Standard encryption algorithm. The second series of attacks presented targets an identification routine using a four-digit secret code ( personal identification number ).