Power Glitch Attack

A power glitch attack is a form of fault injection that aims to make a chip fail briefly so that secrets can leak from its internals. The attacker needs physical access to the device and the ability to induce abrupt supply-voltage disturbances. Unlike side-channel methods that only observe power traces, power glitching actively tampers with the supply to push the processor into an erroneous state. When the circuit misbehaves it can skip checks, bypass counters, or reveal memory contents in ways that are not possible during normal operation. The primary targets are microcontrollers and storage elements that hold seeds, PINs, or cryptographic keys. An adversary who succeeds can extract firmware images and encrypted data blobs and then try offline attacks against those blobs without further interaction with the locked device. This class of attack exposes a hard truth about physical security: software controls are useless if the underlying hardware can be forced into an unexpected state. Defenses must therefore start at the silicon level and extend to the whole device. Good hardware design includes robust brown‑out and voltage monitoring, glitch-resistant clock and power domains, redundant checks, and secure elements that zeroize keys on tamper events. Device makers can add sensors that detect abnormal power or timing, watchdogs that require authenticated resets, and hardware-enforced limits on retry or debug access. Enclosures and manufacturing techniques that increase the cost of invasive access also help. For users, layered practices reduce risk; keeping devices physically secure, using additional passphrases, and employing multi-signature setups ensure that a single compromised unit does not yield total control. When evaluating a wallet or embedded product, look for documented countermeasures against fault injection, third-party security evaluations, and explicit claims about tamper response and secure key handling. Finally, think of a hardware device as an organism that must be defended at every membrane; a breach in the casing can let a small, momentary shock make the organism disclose what it was meant to protect.