Increasing the efficiency of laser fault injections using fast gate level reverse engineering

Abstract

Laser fault injections have been evolving rapidly with the advent of more precise, sophisticated and cost-efficient sources, optics and control circuits. In this paper, we show a methodology to improve the test coverage and to speed up analysis based on laser fault injections by only targeting standard cells of interest. We describe how to identify interesting spatial positions thanks to the use of some chemicals along with an automated Scanning Electron Microscope image acquisition, alignment and processing. Using the latter information, fault injections with a high success rate have been obtained against a hardware implemented AES module using a laser beam. With such tools and methodology, we show that attacks become much faster.