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This tutorial discusses a specific type of glitch attack. It shows how a simple printing loop can be abused, causing a target to print some otherwise private information. This attack will be used to recover a plaintext without any knowledge of the encryption scheme being used.

This section introduces the attack concept by showing some real world examples of vulnerable firmware. Then, it describes the victim firmware that will be used in this tutorial.

Typically, one of the slowest parts of an embedded system is its communication lines. It's pretty common to see a processor running in the MHz range with a serial connection of 96k baud. To make these two different speeds work together, embedded firmware usually fills up a buffer with data and lets a serial driver print on its own time. This setup means we can expect to see code like

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Since we have access to the source code, let's take our time and understand how our attack is going to work before we dive in.

Inside <code>bootloader.c</code>, there are two buffers that are used to store most of the important data. The source code shows:

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This looks very similar to the example code given in the previous section, so it should be vulnerable to a glitching attack. The goal is to cause the loop to continue past its regular limit: <code>data_buffer[0]</code> is the same as <code>ascii_buffer[80]</code>, so a successful glitch should dump the data buffer for us.

As a final step, let's check the assembly code to see exactly what we're trying to glitch through. Run the command

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There's one quirk to notice in this code. In the C source, the for loop checks whether <code>i < ascii_idx</code>. However, in the assembly code, the check is effectively whether <code>i == ascii_idx</code>! This is even easier to glitch - as long as we can break past the <code>brne</code> instruction ''once'', we'll get to the data buffer.

To speed up the tutorial, the script in [[#Appendix: Setup Script]] will open the ChipWhisperer Capture software and fill in all of the appropriate settings. Copy this code into a Python script and run it. Then, open the serial terminal and connect to the target, using the ASCII with Hex display mode. If everything is set up correctly, the Capture 1 button should cause the text <code>r0</code> to appear in the terminal. This is the bootloader's response to a block of ciphertext.

If you can't get this to work, remember that glitching is a very sensitive operation - one glitch timing will probably not work for every board on every day. Try using the glitch explorer to attack different ''Glitch Width''s, ''Glitch Offset''s, and ''Ext Trigger Offset''s. The built-in Glitch Explorer will be very useful here - take a read through [[Tutorial A2 Introduction to Glitch Attacks (including Glitch Explorer)]] if you need a refresher.

There's a lot more that can be done with this type of attack...

You may have been surprised to see that the assembly code uses a <code>brne</code> instruction to check if the loop is finished - after all, we used a less-than comparison in our C source code! Try changing this line to use a more prohibitive loop. Here's how you might do this:

# Find a copy of the [http://www.atmel.com/webdoc/avrassembler/index.html AVR assembler documentation] and find a better instruction to use. You should be able to drop in the <code>brlt</code> instruction without much hassle. Figure out the new op-code for this instruction.

# Upload your new bootloader onto the target and retry the attack. Does it still work? You might be able to see one extra byte from the ASCII buffer, but it will be very difficult to get to the data buffer. Can you change the glitch settings to complete the attack?

The reason why the original assembly code used the <code>brne</code> instruction is because GCC is an ''optimizing compiler''. The compiler doesn't directly translate the C source code into assembly instructions. Instead, it tries to determine if any of the code can be modified to make it faster or more compact. For instance, consider the loop

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Try changing the bootloader's source code to use a volatile variable inside the loop. What happens to the disassembly? Is the loop body longer? Connect to the target board and capture a power trace. Does it look different? You'll have to find a new ''Ext Trigger Offset'' for the glitch module. Can you still perform the attack? Is it feasible to use this fix to avoid glitching attacks?

The following script is used to set up the ChipWhisperer-Lite with all of the necessary settings:

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