Fault Injection Attacks On Non Volatile Memories

**Fault injection attacks on non volatile memories**:

- Réf **ABG-126304**
- Stage master 2 / Ingénieur- Durée 6 mois- Salaire net mensuel 650€- 15/10/2024- Grenoble INP - LCIS- Lieu de travail- Valence Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes France- Champs scientifiques- Electronique
- Informatique
- Sciences de l’ingénieur
- Mots clés- Hardware security, fault injection attack (FIA), non volatile memories (NVM), embedded systems, microcontroller development-
- 31/01/2025**Établissement recruteur**:
**Site web**:
Le LCIS est un laboratoire de recherche public, équipe d’accueil de l’Université Grenoble Alpes associée à Grenoble-INP sur le campus UGA Valence.

Le LCIS rassemble plus de 60 chercheurs en informatique, électronique et automatique autour des systèmes embarqués et communicants.

Les thématiques abordées concernent la sûreté et la sécurité des systèmes embarqués et distribués, la modélisation, l’analyse et la supervision des systèmes complexes ouverts et les systèmes radiofréquences sans fil communicants.

Le LCIS est soutenu et financé par la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

**Description**:

- New memory technologies have emerged recently to replace multiple level of the memory
hierarchy. These promise high density, low energy and high bandwidth memories into a single type
of memory. Moreover, compared to SRAM or DRAM, they are also non volatile, i.e. they retain
data even when power is cut. However, they present some asymmetries in power depending on the
data read or written. As such, it may be possible for an attacker to guess secret information stored
within the memory [1].
Fault injection attacks are active attacks in which the attacker has physical access to the device,
especially the power supply or the clock generator. Both of these attacks are global attacks (i.e. they
target the whole chip) while EM fault injection (EMFI) is a powerful local attack which can target
limited area of the victim chip. By faulting the normal behavior of the circuit, the attacker can alter
the data being stored or read within the memory, or even alter neighboring memory cells [2].
In this internship, we aim to characterize the susceptibility of non volatile memories to fault
injection attacks of different kinds, mainly EMFI, voltage glitch and clock glitch. This exploratory
work will be used to target in-memory computing systems in the future [3, 4]. Based on the
knowledge of the physical phenomenon used to store the information, we want to propose models to
exploit vulnerabilities of these new memories.
The intern will perform fault injection attacks on non volatile memories and try to determine fault
model that best represent the effect of the injected fault (e.g. bit flip, bit set/reset, etc.)
In this internship, the main tasks will be:

- Implementing basic software to drive the NVM
- Conducting fault injection attacks on different NVM
- Analyzing and determining the best way to fault the NVM
- Eventually, designing basic countermeasures suited to NVM against FIA

[1] M. N. I. Khan, S. Bhasin, B. Liu, A. Yuan, A. Chattopadhyay, et S. Ghosh, « Comprehensive
Study of Side-Channel Attack on Emerging Non-Volatile Memories », Journal of Low Power
Electronics and Applications, vol. 11, no 4, Art. no 4, déc. 2021, doi: 10.3390/jlpea11040038.
[2] M. Heidary et B. K. Joardar, « Hardware Attacks on ReRAM-Based AI Accelerators », in 2024
IEEE 17th Dallas Circuits and Systems Conference (DCAS), avr. 2024, p. 1-4. doi:
10.1109/DCAS61159.2024.10539864.
[3] Z. Wang, F.H. Meng, Y. Park, J. K. Eshraghian, et W. D. Lu, « Side-Channel Attack Analysis on
In-Memory Computing Architectures », IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, vol.
12, no 1, p. 109-121, janv. 2024, doi: 10.1109/TETC.2023.3257684.
[4] M. T. Arafin et Z. Lu, « Security Challenges of Processing-In-Memory Systems », in
Proceedings of the 2020 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, in GLSVLSI ’20. New York, NY,
USA: Association for Computing Machinery, sept. 2020, p. 229-234. doi:
10.1145/3386263.3411365.

**Profil**:
Applicants must be enrolled in a Master’s degree or engineering school in cyber
security, computer engineering, electrical engineering or embedded systems and have interests in
hardware security.
- Required skills:

- C and assembly
- Microcontroller development (Arduino, STM32 or ARM)
- Embedded systems
- Basic knowledge of physical phenomenon used in NVM is a plus

**Prise de fonction**:

- 03/02/2025