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Persistent Fault Analysis on Block Ciphers

Authors:
Fan Zhang , College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University; Institute of Cyber Security Research, Zhejiang University
Xiaoxuan Lou , College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University; Institute of Cyber Security Research, Zhejiang University
Xinjie Zhao , The Institute of North Electronic Equipment
Shivam Bhasin , Nanyang Technological University
Wei He , Shield Laboratory, Huawei International Pte. Ltd.
Ruyi Ding , College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, China; Georgia Institute of Technology, GA
Samiya Qureshi , College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University
Kui Ren , College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University
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DOI: 10.13154/tches.v2018.i3.150-172
URL: https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/7272
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Abstract: Persistence is an intrinsic nature for many errors yet has not been caught enough attractions for years. In this paper, the feature of persistence is applied to fault attacks, and the persistent fault attack is proposed. Different from traditional fault attacks, adversaries can prepare the fault injection stage before the encryption stage, which relaxes the constraint of the tight-coupled time synchronization. The persistent fault analysis (PFA) is elaborated on different implementations of AES-128, specially fault hardened implementations based on Dual Modular Redundancy (DMR). Our experimental results show that PFA is quite simple and efficient in breaking these typical implementations. To show the feasibility and practicability of our attack, a case study is illustrated on the shared library Libgcrypt with rowhammer technique. Approximately 8200 ciphertexts are enough to extract the master key of AES-128 when PFA is applied to Libgcrypt1.6.3 with redundant encryption based DMR. This work puts forward a new direction of fault attacks and can be extended to attack other implementations under more interesting scenarios.
BibTeX
@article{tches-2018-29065,
  title={Persistent Fault Analysis on Block Ciphers},
  journal={IACR Trans. Cryptogr. Hardw. Embed. Syst.},
  publisher={Ruhr-Universität Bochum},
  volume={2018, Issue 3},
  pages={150-172},
  url={https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/7272},
  doi={10.13154/tches.v2018.i3.150-172},
  author={Fan Zhang and Xiaoxuan Lou and Xinjie Zhao and Shivam Bhasin and Wei He and Ruyi Ding and Samiya Qureshi and Kui Ren},
  year=2018
}