Attacking Hardware AES with DFA

Abstract: We present the first practical attack on a hardware AES accelerator with 256 bit embedded keys using DFA. We identify the challenges of adapting well-known theoretical AES DFA models to hardware under attack from voltage fault injection and present solutions to those challenges. As a result, we managed to recover 278 real-world AES-256 keys from a secure computing system in a matter of hours with minimal cost.