Practical Electrical Glitching Attacks

This research presents an in-depth analysis and practical exploitation of hardware fault injection attacks using VCC glitching on the ESP32 platform to recover cryptographic keys from traces obtained during induced fault conditions.

The attack leverages precise manipulation of the power supply by momentarily pulling VCC to GND for nanosecond-scale intervals, causing transient malfunction of the integrated circuit and enabling attacker-controlled fault scenarios.

The study demonstrates the application of VCC glitching techniques to:

- Bypass hardware debug protection mechanisms such as JTAG and SWD

- Circumvent secure boot enforcement - Bypass One-Time Programmable (OTP) memory protections (eFuse) to extract sensitive cryptographic keys