Vulnerabilities
Fault Injection
Also known as: Glitching attack, Fault attack
Definition
A class of physical or logical attacks that deliberately induce abnormal conditions in hardware or software to bypass security checks or leak secrets.
Examples
- Voltage glitching a smart card to skip a PIN verification branch.
- Differential fault analysis on AES to recover a key from a corrupted ciphertext.
Related terms
Side-Channel Attack
An attack that recovers secrets from a system by observing physical or implementation characteristics — timing, power, electromagnetic emissions, caches, acoustic signals — rather than logical flaws.
Timing Attack
A side-channel attack that recovers secret information by measuring how long an operation takes under different inputs.
Hardware Trojan
A malicious modification of an integrated circuit, inserted during design or fabrication, that triggers covert behaviour such as data leakage or denial of service.
Cold Boot Attack
A physical attack that recovers cryptographic keys and other secrets from RAM by rapidly powering off and re-reading the volatile memory before its contents fully decay.
Rowhammer
A hardware vulnerability in DRAM where repeatedly activating one memory row causes bit flips in physically adjacent rows, undermining memory integrity.