Side-Channel Attack

Threat actors may use a side-channel attack attempts to gather information or influence the program execution of a system by measuring or exploiting indirect effects of the ground station. Side-Channel attacks can be active or passive. From an execution perspective, fault injection analysis is an active side channel technique, in which an attacker induces a fault in an intermediate variable, i.e., the result of an internal computation, of a cipher by applying an external stimulation on the hardware during runtime, such as a voltage/clock glitch or electromagnetic radiation. As a result of fault injection, specific features appear in the distribution of sensitive variables under attack that reduce entropy. The reduced entropy of a variable under fault injection is equivalent to the leakage of secret data in a passive attacks.