Faulty Cat

Faulty Cat is an Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) tool, designed specifically for self-study and hobby research.

IMPORTANT: The plastic shield is critical for safe operation. While the output itself is isolated from the input connections, you will still easily shock yourself on the exposed high-voltage capacitor and circuitry. NEVER operate the device without the shield.

You’ll need to program the Faulty Cat with the firmware in the firmware directory. You can run other tasks on the microcontroller as well.

WARNING: The high voltage will be applied across the SMA connector. If an injection tip (coil) is present, it will absorb most of the power. If you leave the SMA connector open, you will present a high voltage pulse across this SMA and could shock yourself. Do NOT touch the output SMA tip as a general “best practice”, and treat the output as if it has a high voltage present.

Technical Differences between Faulty Cat and ChipSHOUTER and PicoEMP:

• ChipSHOUTER uses a much more powerful high voltage circuit and transformer (up to ~30W vs ~0.2W) that gives it almost unlimited glitch delivery, typically limited by your probe tip. The PicoEMP is slower to recover, typically ~1 to 4 seconds between glitches.

• ChipSHOUTER has a larger internal energy storage & more powerful output drivers.

• ChipSHOUTER has a controlled high-voltage setting from 150V to 500V.

• PicoEMP generates ~250V, there is some feedback but it’s uncalibrated. The PicoEMP allows some control of output pulse size by instead controlling the drive signal. This is less reliable (more variability in the output), but meets the goal of using the lowest-cost control method.