Fault Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Systems

Fault injection attacks represent deliberate perturbations of cryptographic hardware or its operating environment to induce computational errors. By exploiting variations in supply voltage, clock signals, temperature or electromagnetic fields, attackers disrupt intermediate calculations within encryption algorithms. The resulting faulty outputs may reveal secret keys or internal state through differential analysis, thereby bypassing the mathematical strength of modern ciphers. Techniques such as differential fault analysis and persistent fault analysis have demonstrated the practicality of extracting secrets from AES and other symmetric-key algorithms using modest, low-cost equipment. These methods pose a particular threat to embedded devices—from smart cards to Internet of Things nodes—where limited physical protections and resource constraints compound vulnerability. Research has accordingly focused on both refining attack methodologies, including high-precision voltage glitching and electromagnetic fault induction, and developing robust countermeasures. Detection-based strategies embed internal monitors or redundancy checks to identify anomalies, while infective and masking schemes aim to destroy exploitable data upon fault occurrence. Complementary formal verification frameworks have also emerged to evaluate resilience at the design stage. The global significance of this field extends to secure payment systems, critical infrastructure and consumer electronics, underscoring the imperative for co-design approaches that balance performance, cost and security.

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Fault Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in fault injection attacks on cryptographic systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Fault injection attack: A physical assault on a cryptographic device that deliberately introduces errors into computation to reveal secret information.

Differential Fault Analysis (DFA): A cryptanalytic method comparing correct and faulty outputs to recover secret keys.

Voltage glitching: The rapid, controlled fluctuation of supply voltage to induce faults in electronic circuits.

Electromagnetic fault injection: The use of electromagnetic pulses to disturb internal circuit behaviour and cause erroneous outputs.

References

1. Protecting FPGA-Based Cryptohardware Implementations from Fault Attacks Using ADCs. Sensors (2024).
2. How Practical Are Fault Injection Attacks, Really?. IEEE Access (2022).
3. A Systematic Review of Fault Injection Attacks on IoT Systems. Electronics (2022).
4. Shaping the Glitch: Optimizing Voltage Fault Injection Attacks. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2019).
5. Persistent Fault Analysis on Block Ciphers. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2018).
6. Persistent Fault Attack in Practice. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2020).
7. M&M: Masks and Macs against Physical Attacks. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2018).
8. FIVER – Robust Verification of Countermeasures against Fault Injections. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2021).