Experimental evaluation of protections against laser-induced faults and consequences on fault modeling

Lasers can be used by hackers to situations to inject faults in circuits and induce security flaws. On-line detection mechanisms are classically proposed to counter such attacks, and are often based on error detecting codes. However, the efficiency of such schemes has not been precisely validated against real attack conditions. This paper presents results showing that, with a given type of laser, a classical protection technique can leave open doors to an attacker. The results give also insights into the fault models to be taken into account when designing a secured circuit.