Fault Injection Attack (FIA)

A Fault Injection Attack (FIA) is an attack that intentionally induces errors or abnormal conditions in a device (hardware or firmware) to make it behave incorrectly — often to bypass protections, reveal secret data, or enable other attacks such as Differential Fault Analysis (DFA). Instead of exploiting a software bug, an attacker forces the system into an unexpected state (a fault) and studies the faulty outputs to gain advantage.

Faults are induced via changes to the device’s physical/operational conditions. Typical classes include:

• Voltage/Power Glitches — brief drops/spikes in supply voltage or brown-out conditions.
• Clock/Timing Glitches — perturbations of the clock (frequency, jitter) to cause timing violations.
• Environmental Stress — extreme temperature changes or rapid thermal transients.
• Electromagnetic (EM) Disturbance — strong EM fields to disturb logic or interfaces.
• Laser/Optical Injection — localized illumination to flip internal states (used in lab research).
• Radiation/Ionizing Events — single-event upsets (SEUs) in space/aviation environments.
• Faulty I/O or Bus Manipulation — tampering with communication lines to introduce errors.