EM Fault Model Characterization on SoCs: From Different Architectures to the Same Fault Model

Abstract

Recently, several Fault Attacks (FAs) which target modern Central Processing Units (CPUs) have emerged. These attacks are studied from a practical point of view and, due to the modern CPUs complexity, the underlying fault effect is usually unknown. Only few works try to characterize them at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level.In this article, we apply a state-of-the-art faults model characterization approach on modern CPU to evaluate the fault model on two different CPUs from different architectures with the same injection mediums. We target the CPU of the Raspberry Pi 3 (ARM) and an Intel Core i3 (x86) and perturbing them with ElectroMagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI). From the ISA point of view, we disclose a similar fault model on each component. Additionally, we evaluate a widely used complex software, OpenSSL, against this fault model.