13 Basics of Glitching
Dear reader, please indulge me in a little mythology. After that, we’ll move on to modern clock and voltage glitching attacks.
Way back in the good old days, so the story says, a satellite TV smart card was vulnerable to memory corruption. The people did rejoice, as a memory corruption exploit was sufficient to unlock all of the channels and extract all of the card’s memory. Then from the heavens came a message—an EEPROM update, rather than a prophecy—and the cards were patched to spin in an infinite loop rather than decode Captain Picard’s latest fight with the Borg. The exact patch and the exact card are lost to time, but in C we might say the code looked something like the following.
Because the card spins in an infinite ...
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