CAPEC-624

Meta Abstraction Level
Meta — Very abstract, high-level category
Standard — Specific enough to understand
Detailed — Tied to specific technique Stable MITRE CAPEC Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development
Incomplete — Partially defined
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CAPEC Likelihood: Low Severity: High
Hardware Fault Injection

Description

The adversary uses disruptive signals or events, or alters the physical environment a device operates in, to cause faulty behavior in electronic devices. This can include electromagnetic pulses, laser pulses, clock glitches, ambient temperature extremes, and more. When performed in a controlled manner on devices performing cryptographic operations, this faulty behavior can be exploited to derive secret key information.

Prerequisites

Physical access to the system

The adversary must be cognizant of where fault injection vulnerabilities exist in the system in order to leverage them for exploitation.

Mitigations

Implement robust physical security countermeasures and monitoring.

Skills Required

[High] Adversaries require non-trivial technical skills to create and implement fault injection attacks. Although this style of attack has become easier (commercial equipment and training classes are available to perform these attacks), they usual require significant setup and experimentation time during which physical access to the device is required.