Attacking Hardware AES with DFA

Yifan Lu

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arXiv · 1902.08693

Attacking Hardware AES with DFA

Yifan Lu

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Abstract

We present the first practical attack on a hardware AES accelerator with 256 bit embedded keys using DFA. We identify the challenges of adapting well-known theoretical AES DFA models to hardware under attack from voltage fault injection and present solutions to those challenges. As a result, we managed to recover 278 real-world AES-256 keys from a secure computing system in a matter of hours with minimal cost.

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Yifan Lu. 2019-02-22. Attacking Hardware AES with DFA. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08693

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