Electromagnetic waves have been recently pointed out as a medium for fault injection within circuits featuring cryptographic modules. Indeed, it has been experimentally demonstrated by A. Dehbaoui et al. [3] that an electromagnetic pulse, produced with a high voltage pulse generator and a probe similar to that used to perform EM analyses, was susceptible to create faults exploitable from a cryptanalysis viewpoint. An analysis of the induced faults [4] revealed that they originated from timing constraint violations. This paper experimentally demonstrates that EM injection, performed with enhanced probes is very local and can produce not only timing faults but also bit-set and bit-reset faults. This result clearly extends the range of the threats associated with EM fault injection.Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2014 http://dx.

The use of electromagnetic glitches has recently emerged as an effective fault injection technique for the purpose of conducting physical attacks against integrated circuits. First research works have shown that electromagnetic faults are induced by timing constraint violations and that they are also located in the vicinity of the injection probe. This paper reports the study of the efficiency of a glitch detector against EM injection. This detector was originally designed to detect any attempt of inducing timing violations by means of clock or power glitches. Because electromagnetic disturbances are more local than global, the use of a single detector proved to be inefficient. Our subsequent investigation of the use of several detectors to obtain a full fault detection coverage is reported, it also provides further insights into the properties of electromagnetic injection and into the key role played by the injection probe.

ElectroMagnetic (EM) waves have been recently pointed out as a medium for fault injection within Integrated Circuits (IC). Indeed, it has been experimentally demonstrated that an EM Pulse (EMP), produced with a high voltage pulse generator and an injector similar to that used to perform EM analyses, was susceptible to create faults exploitable from a cryptanalysis viewpoint. An analysis of the induced faults revealed that they originated from timing constraint violations. In this context, this paper demonstrates that EM injection, performed with enhanced injectors, can produce not only timing faults but also bit-set and bit-reset faults on an IC at rest. This first result clearly extends the range of the threats associated with EM fault injection. It then demonstrates, considering two different ICs under operation: an FPGA and a modern microcontroller, that faults produced by EMP injection are not timing faults but correspond to a different model which is presented in this paper. This model allows to explain experimental results introduced in all former communications.