Improper Protection against Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EM-FI)

Opis

The device is susceptible to electromagnetic fault injection attacks, causing device internal information to be compromised or security mechanisms to be bypassed.

Electromagnetic fault injection may allow an attacker to locally and dynamically modify the signals (both internal and external) of an integrated circuit. EM-FI attacks consist of producing a local, transient magnetic field near the device, inducing current in the device wires. A typical EMFI setup is made up of a pulse injection circuit that generates a high current transient in an EMI coil, producing an abrupt magnetic pulse which couples to the target producing faults in the device, which can lead to:

- Bypassing security mechanisms such as secure JTAG or Secure Boot

- Leaking device information

- Modifying program flow

- Perturbing secure hardware modules (e.g. random number generators)

Skutki

• Confidentiality, Integrity, Access Control, Availability

  Modify Memory; Read Memory; Gain Privileges or Assume Identity; Bypass Protection Mechanism; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands

Zapobieganie

• Architecture and Design, Implementation

  - 1. Redundancy - By replicating critical operations and comparing the two outputs can help indicate whether a fault has been injected.

  - 2. Error detection and correction codes - Gay, Mael, et al. proposed a new scheme that not only detects faults injected by a malicious adversary but also automatically corrects single nibble/byte errors introduced by low-multiplicity faults.

  - 3. Fail by default coding - When checking conditions (switch or if) check all possible cases and fail by default because the default case in a switch (or the else part of a cascaded if-else-if construct) is used for dealing with the last possible (and valid) value without checking. This is prone to fault injection because this alternative is easily selected as a result of potential data manipulation [REF-1141].

  - 4. Random Behavior - adding random delays before critical operations, so that timing is not predictable.

  - 5. Program Flow Integrity Protection - The program flow can be secured by integrating run-time checking aiming at detecting control flow inconsistencies. One such example is tagging the source code to indicate the points not to be bypassed [REF-1147].

  - 6. Sensors - Usage of sensors can detect variations in voltage and current.

  - 7. Shields - physical barriers to protect the chips from malicious manipulation.

Przykłady podatności

• CVE-2020-27211 Chain: microcontroller system-on-chip uses a register value stored in flash to set product protection state on the memory bus and does not contain protection against fault injection (CWE-1319) which leads to an incorrect initialization of the memory bus (CWE-1419) leading the product to be in an unprotected state.

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-693 Protection Mechanism Failure

Kiedy powstaje

• Architecture and Design
• Implementation

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific, Not OS-Specific, Not Architecture-Specific, System on Chip, Microcontroller Hardware, Memory Hardware, Power Management Hardware, Processor Hardware, Test/Debug Hardware, Sensor Hardware

Uwagi

This entry is attack-oriented and may require significant modification in future versions, or even deprecation. It is not clear whether there is really a design "mistake" that enables such attacks, so this is not necessarily a weakness and may be more appropriate for CAPEC.

Źródła

1. Secure Application Programming in the presence of Side Channel Attacks — Marc Witteman, 2017
2. Injection of transient faults using electromagnetic pulses. Practical results on a cryptographic system — A. Dehbaoui, J. M. Dutertre, B. Robisson, P. Orsatelli, P. Maurine, A. Tria, 2012
3. Precise Spatio-Temporal Electromagnetic Fault Injections on Data Transfers — A. Menu, S. Bhasin, J. M. Dutertre, J. B. Rigaud, J. Danger, 2019
4. BAM BAM!! On Reliability of EMFI for in-situ Automotive ECU Attacks — Colin O'Flynn
5. Design and Validation of a Platform for Electromagnetic Fault Injection — J. Balasch, D. Arumí, S. Manich
6. Error control scheme for malicious and natural faults in cryptographic modules — M. Gay, B. Karp, O. Keren, I. Polian, 2019
7. Automatic Integration of Counter-Measures Against Fault Injection Attacks — M. L. Akkar, L. Goubin, O. Ly
8. Physical Security Attacks Against Silicon Devices — Texas Instruments, 2022