  If devices are physically accessible optical fault injection attacks pose a
great threat since the data processed as well as the operation flow can be
manipulated. Successful physical attacks may lead not only to leakage of secret
information such as cryptographic private keys, but can also cause economic
damage especially if as a result of such a manipulation a critical
infrastructure is successfully attacked. Laser based attacks exploit the
sensitivity of CMOS technologies to electromagnetic radiation in the visible or
the infrared spectrum. It can be expected that radiation-hard designs,
specially crafted for space applications, are more robust not only against
high-energy particles and short electromagnetic waves but also against optical
fault injection attacks. In this work we investigated the sensitivity of
radiation-hard JICG shift registers to optical fault injection attacks. In our
experiments, we were able to trigger bit-set and bit-reset repeatedly changing
the data stored in single JICG flip-flops despite their high-radiation fault
tolerance.
