Optical Fault Injection Attacks against Radiation-Hard Registers

If devices are physically accessible optical fault injection attacks pose a great threat since the data processed as well as the operation flow can be manipulated. Successful physical attacks may lead not only to leakage of secret information such as cryptographic private keys, but can also cause economic damage especially if as a result of such a manipulation a critical infrastructure is successfully attacked. Laser based attacks exploit the sensitivity of CMOS technologies to electromagnetic radiation in the visible or the infrared spectrum. It can be expected that radiation-hard designs, specially crafted for space applications, are more robust not only against high-energy particles and short electromagnetic waves but also against optical fault injection attacks. In this work we investigated the sensitivity of radiation-hard JICG shift registers to optical fault injection attacks. In our experiments, we were able to trigger bit-set and bit-reset repeatedly changing the data stored in single JICG flip-flops despite their high-radiation fault tolerance.