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.
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the protection enforced by the operating system and steal the secrets from the program. In this article, we systematize microarchitectural side channels with a focus on attacks and defenses in cryptographic applications. We make three contributions. (1) We survey past research literature to categorize microarchitectural side-channel attacks. Since these are hardware attacks targeting software, we summarize the vulnerable implementations in software, as well as flawed designs in hardware. (2) We identify common strategies to mitigate microarchitectural attacks, from the application, OS, and hardware levels. (3) We conduct a large-scale evaluation on popular cryptographic applications in the real world and analyze the severity, practicality, and impact of side-channel vulnerabilities. This survey is expected to inspire side-channel research community to discover new attacks, and more importantly, propose new defense solutions against them.
Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the protection enforced by the operating system and steal the secrets from the program. In this paper, we systematize microarchitectural side channels with a focus on attacks and defenses in cryptographic applications. We make three contributions. (1) We survey past research literature to categorize microarchitectural side-channel attacks. Since these are hardware attacks targeting software, we summarize the vulnerable implementations in software, as well as flawed designs in hardware. (2) We identify common strategies to mitigate microarchitectural attacks, from the application, OS and hardware levels. (3) We conduct a large-scale evaluation on popular cryptographic applications in the real world, and analyze the severity, practicality and impact of side-channel vulnerabilities. This survey is expected to inspire side-channel research community to discover new attacks, and more importantly, propose new defense solutions against them.CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Side-channel analysis and countermeasures.
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