Fault Injection

Fault injection consists of deliberately perturbing a computation (through voltage glitching, clock glitching, electromagnetic pulses or laser shots) so that the target produces an erroneous result or skips a security check. The faulty behaviour is then exploited.

A common cryptographic application is Differential Fault Analysis (DFA): by comparing a correct ciphertext with one produced under a fault injected at a chosen round, the key space collapses dramatically and the key can be recovered.