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Fault Template Attacks on Block Ciphers Exploiting Fault Propagation

Authors:
Sayandeep Saha , Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Arnab Bag , Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Debapriya Basu Roy , Technische Universität München
Sikhar Patranabis , ETH Zurich
Debdeep Mukhopadhyay , Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-45721-1_22 (login may be required)
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Conference: EUROCRYPT 2020
Abstract: Fault attacks (FA) are one of the potent practical threats to modern cryptographic implementations. Over the years the FA techniques have evolved, gradually moving towards the exploitation of device-centric properties of the faults. In this paper, we exploit the fact that activation and propagation of a fault through a given combinational circuit (i.e., observability of a fault) is data-dependent. Next, we show that this property of combinational circuits leads to powerful Fault Template Attacks (FTA), even for implementations having dedicated protections against both power and fault-based vulnerabilities. The attacks found in this work are applicable even if the fault injection is made at the middle rounds of a block cipher, which are out of reach for most of the other existing fault analysis strategies. Quite evidently, they also work for a known-plaintext scenario. Moreover, the middle round attacks are entirely blind in the sense that no access to the ciphertexts (correct/faulty) or plaintexts are required. The adversary is only assumed to have the power of repeating an unknown plaintext several times. Practical validation over a hardware implementation of SCA-FA protected PRESENT, and simulated evaluation on a public software implementation of protected AES prove the efficacy of the proposed attacks.
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BibTeX
@inproceedings{eurocrypt-2020-30196,
  title={Fault Template Attacks on Block Ciphers Exploiting Fault Propagation},
  booktitle={39th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Zagreb, Croatia, May 10–14, 2020, Proceedings},
  series={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  publisher={Springer},
  keywords={Fault Attack;Fault Propagation;Masking},
  volume={12105},
  doi={10.1007/978-3-030-45721-1_22},
  author={Sayandeep Saha and Arnab Bag and Debapriya Basu Roy and Sikhar Patranabis and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay},
  year=2020
}