Study on Effect of ElectroMagnetic Fault Injection Attack on Dynamic Random Access Memory

To investigate the effect of ElectroMagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) attacks on the security of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), DRAMs are applied to an EMFI platform and are attacked with same attack settings firstly in this paper. Firstly, the attack results are collected and the faults are classified. Secondly, the mechanism of the faults occurred in the experiments are analyzed based on the fundamental structure of DRAM. Finally, the threats of the faults occurred in DRAM to the security of computer system are analyzed. In the experiments, multiple transient faults and multiple persistent faults are found. According to the experiments and analysis, it is found that the EMFI can inject persistent faults into the specified addresses of DRAM with low spatio-temporal resolution. In addition, persistent faults are successfully injected into S-box of AES-128 that stored in DRAM in this paper, and the key of AES is recovered by exploiting the faults. The experiment of key cracking indicates that EMFI attacks on DRAM pose serious security threats to computer systems, and the experiment indicates that researching on the security of DRAM is of great significance to hardware security.