---
title: "BADFET - Red Balloon Security"
description: "Learn about Red Balloon Security’s BADFET, an electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) platform created to democratize EMFI research on embedded systems."
date: "2021-11-19T17:19:58+00:00"
language: "en-US"
canonical_url: "https://xckd6kzuxte054o.onstatic.studio/research/badfet/"
source_url: "https://xckd6kzuxte054o.onstatic.studio/research/badfet/"
content_type: "text/markdown"
---

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# BADFET










## DEFEATING SECURE BOOT










Defeating modern secure boot using second-order pulsed electromagnetic fault injection.
























## BADFET










## DEFEATING SECURE BOOT










Defeating modern secure boot using second-order pulsed electromagnetic fault injection.























## CLIENT





Internal R&D










## YEAR





2017














BADFET is a low-cost, high performance pulsed Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) platform. BADFET was developed through internal research, and the purpose of this project is to democratize EMFI research. This research makes two contributions. First, it presents a novel method of leveraging controlled electromagnetic pulses to attack modern computers using second order effects of induced faults across multiple components of the target computer. Second, it presents the design and implementation of the BADFET system which consists of multiple subsystems (an XYZ stage, a pulser, and an optional recording device). Using these two contributions, this research presents a reliable and effective attack against a widely used TrustZone-based secure boot implementation on a multi-core 1Ghz+ ARM embedded system.

 

[https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/BADFET](https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/BADFET)























## CLIENT





Internal R&D










## YEAR





2017














BADFET is a low-cost, high performance pulsed Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) platform. BADFET was developed through internal research, and the purpose of this project is to democratize EMFI research. This research makes two contributions. First, it presents a novel method of leveraging controlled electromagnetic pulses to attack modern computers using second order effects of induced faults across multiple components of the target computer. Second, it presents the design and implementation of the BADFET system which consists of multiple subsystems (an XYZ stage, a pulser, and an optional recording device). Using these two contributions, this research presents a reliable and effective attack against a widely used TrustZone-based secure boot implementation on a multi-core 1Ghz+ ARM embedded system.

 

[https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/BADFET](https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/BADFET)















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