Fault attacks on two software countermeasures

Abstract : Injection of transient faults can be used as a way to attack embedded systems. On embedded processors such as microcontrollers, several studies showed that such a transient fault injection could corrupt either the data loads from the memory or the assembly instructions executed by the circuit. Some countermeasure schemes which rely on temporal redundancy have been proposed to handle this issue. Among them, several schemes add this redundancy at assembly instruction level. In this paper, we perform a practical evaluation for two of those countermeasure schemes by using a pulsed electromagnetic fault injection process on a 32-bit microcontroller.