Engineering

Philosophy

Reliability engineering

Embedded system

Operating system

Parallel computing

Computer science

CPU cache

Fault (geology)

Seismology

Electronic circuit

Abstraction

Geology

Software

Physics

Fault injection

Fault tolerance

Fault model

Optics

Epistemology

Cache

Focus (optics)

Software fault tolerance

Electrical engineering

Key (lock)

Journal of Cryptographic Engineering

The last years have seen the emergence of fault attacks targeting modern central processing units (CPUs). These attacks are analyzed at a very high abstraction level and, due to the modern CPUs complexity, the underlying fault effect is usually unknown. Recently, a few articles have focused on characterizing faults on modern CPUs. In this article, we focus on the electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) characterization on a bare-metal implementation. With this approach, we discover and understand new effects on micro-architectural subsystems. We target the BCM2837 where we successfully demonstrate persistent faults on L1 instruction cache, L1 data cache and L2 cache. We also show that faults can corrupt the memory management unit (MMU). To validate our fault model, we realize a persistent fault analysis to retrieve an AES key.

Electromagnetic fault injection against a complex CPU, toward new micro-architectural fault models