Fault Injection
Fault injection disturbs a chip's voltage, clock or electromagnetic environment so that it skips a security check or leaks data.
What Is a Fault Injection?
Fault injection (glitching) is a physical attack: the attacker briefly disturbs the chip with a voltage spike, a clock glitch, a laser pulse or an electromagnetic burst at the moment it runs a security check, so the check is skipped or memory is read out.
It needs the device in hand and lab equipment. In 2020, Kraken Security Labs showed a voltage-glitching attack that extracted the encrypted seed from a Trezor One and Model T, which have no secure element. Secure elements are designed and certified to detect and resist such faults.
A strong passphrase defeats seed extraction on any device, because the passphrase is never stored on it.
Trezor is a hardware wallet by SatoshiLabs. It stores private keys offline to secure cryptocurrencies.
Read full definitionA secure element is a tamper-resistant chip built to store secrets and resist physical attacks such as side-channel analysis and fault injection.
Read full definitionA passphrase is an additional security layer for cryptocurrency wallets, acting as a 25th word in the BIP39 seed phrase, protecting access to hidden wallets.
Read full definitionReal-World Examples
Example 1: A thief glitches a stolen wallet's microcontroller to dump its memory and then brute-forces the PIN offline.
Example 2: The same attack yields a seed, but the funds sit behind a passphrase the thief does not have.
PIN Protection is a security feature that requires a personal identification number (PIN) to access a cryptocurrency wallet or device, preventing unauthorized access.
Read full definitionA passphrase is an additional security layer for cryptocurrency wallets, acting as a 25th word in the BIP39 seed phrase, protecting access to hidden wallets.
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