Get Your Glitch On With A PicoEMP And A 3D Printer

August 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

We’re not sure what [Aaron Christophel] calls his automated chip glitching setup built from a 3D printer, but we’re going to go ahead and dub it the “Glitch-o-Matic 9000.” Has a nice ring to it.

Of course, this isn’t a commercial product, or even a rig that’s necessarily intended for repeated use. It’s more of a tactical build, which is still pretty cool if you ask us. It started with a proof-of-concept exploration, summarized in the first video below. That’s where [Aaron] assembled and tested the major pieces, which included a PicoEMP, the bit that actually generates the high-voltage pulses intended to scramble a running microcontroller temporarily, along with a ChipWhisperer and an oscilloscope.

The trouble with the POC setup was that glitching the target chip, an LPC2388 microcontroller, involved manually scanning the business end of the PicoEMP over the package. That’s a tedious and error-prone process, which is perfect for automation. In the second video below, [Aaron] has affixed the PicoEMP to his 3D printer, giving him three-axis control of the tip position. That let him build up a heat map of potential spots to glitch, which eventually led to a successful fault injection attack and a clean firmware dump.

It’s worth noting that the whole reason [Aaron] had to resort to such extreme measures in the first place was the resilience of the target chip against power supply-induced glitching attacks. You might not need to build something like the Glitch-o-Matic, but it’s good to keep in mind in case you run up against such a hard target. Continue reading “Get Your Glitch On With A PicoEMP And A 3D Printer” →

Everything You Didn’t Know You Need To Know About Glitching Attacks

August 25, 2022 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

If you’ve always been intrigued by the idea of performing hardware attacks but never knew where to start, then we’ve got the article for you: an in-depth look at the hows and whys of hardware glitching.

Attentive readers will recall that we’ve featured [Matthew Alt]’s reverse engineering exploits before, like the time he got root on a Linux-based arcade cabinet. For something a bit more challenging, he chose a Trezor One crypto wallet this time. We briefly covered a high-stakes hack (third item) on one of these wallets by [Joe Grand] a while back, but [Matthew] offers much, much more detail.

After introducing the theory of glitching attacks, which seek to force a processor into an undefined state using various methods, [Matthew] discusses the specifics of the Trezor wallet and how the attack was planned.

His target — the internal voltage regulator of the wallet’s STM32 microcontroller — required desoldering a few caps before the attack could begin, which was performed with a ChipWhisperer. After resolving a few initial timing issues, he was able to glitch the chip into dropping to the lowest level of readout protection, which gave access to the dongle’s SRAM through an ST-Link debugger.

While this summary may make the whole thing sound trivial, it’s obvious that the attack was anything but, nor was the effort that went into writing it all up. The whole thing reads a little like a techno-thriller, and there’s plenty of detail there if you’re looking for a tutorial on chip glitching. We’re looking forward to part 2, which will concentrate on electromagnetic fault-injection using a PicoEMP and what looks like a modified 3D printer.