Inducing Momentary Faults Within Secure Smartcards

Architecture and Background

Christopher Tarnovsky: Inducing Momentary Faults Within Secure Smartcards / Microcontrollers This presentation is intended for individuals with an understanding of the Intel 8051 and Motorola 6805 processor families from an Assembly language perspective. This will be an interactive presentation with the audience.

Vulnerability Analysis

Log files will be examined that have been taken from the targets (smartcards) at every clock cycle of the CPU during its runtime. We will discuss our possibilities and determine points in time (clock cycle periods) to momentarily induce a fault within the target.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Our goal will be to override the normal behavior of the target for our own use such as: -Temporary changes- Readout of normally private records from the device - Permanent changes- Change non-volatile memory to create a back-door or completely rewrite behavior model Both smartcards contain a Cryptographic co-processor and are known to have been used to secure Data, PCs, laptops and Sun-Ray terminals. Flylogic Engineering, LLC specializes in analysis of semiconductors from a security ";how strong is it really"standpoint.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

We offer detailed reports on substrate attacks which define if a problem exists. If a problem is identified, we explain in a detailed report all aspects of how the attack was done, level of complexity and so on. This is something we believe is unique and allows the customer to then go back to the chip vendor armed with the knowledge to make them make it better (or possibly use a different part). For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 16 Archive here: