Electromagnetic Glitch on the AES Round Counter

This article presents a Round Addition Analysis on a software implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (aes) algorithm. The round keys are computed on-the-fly during each encryption. A non-invasive transient fault injection is achieved on the aes round counter. The attack is performed by injecting a very short electromagnetic glitch on a 32-bit microcontroller based on the arm Cortex-M3 processor. Using this experimental setup, we are able to disrupt the round counter increment at the end of the penultimate round and execute one additional round. This faulty execution enables us to recover the encryption key with only two pairs of corresponding correct and faulty ciphertexts.