SoK: A Beginner-Friendly Introduction to Fault Injection Attacks

Abstract: Fault Injection is the study of observing how systems behave under unusual stress, environmental or otherwise. In practice, fault injection involves testing the limits of computer systems and finding novel ways to potentially break cyber-physical security. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we provide a beginner-friendly introduction to this research topic and an in-depth taxonomy of fault injection techniques. Second, we highlight the current state-of-the-art and provide a cost-benefit analysis of each attack method. Third, for those interested in doing fault injection research, we provide a replication analysis of an existing vulnerability detection tool and identify a research focus for future work.