Attacking Hardware AES with DFA (Differential Fault Analysis)

guest · Feb 25, 2019

Attacking Hardware AES with DFA
February 22, 2019
https://yifan.lu/2019/02/22/attacking-hardware-aes-with-dfa/

For the past couple of months, I have been trying to extract the hardware keys from the PlayStation Vita. I wrote a paper describing the whole process with all the technical details, but I thought I would also write a more casual blog post about it as well.

The main idea of DFA is this: we can use glitch attacks on AES hardware just as we can on processors, but instead of using it to control code execution, we use it to make faulty AES encryptions with the right key. Since AES is a brittle algorithm, slight modifications will cause it to leak information about the key in unintended ways and we abuse this fact.

Unfortunately, there is not much interest in AES DFA outside of academia. A search on Github shows a handful of results and overall we only found two serious implementation of AES DFA attacks.
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Paper: "Attacking Hardware AES with DFA" (PDF - 1.15 MB): https://yifan.lu/images/2019/02/Attacking_Hardware_AES_with_DFA.pdf

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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Attacking Hardware AES with DFA (Differential Fault Analysis)

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