Precise fault-injections using voltage and temperature manipulation for differential cryptanalysis

Abstract

Abstract-State-of-the-art fault-based cryptanalysis methods are capable of breaking most recent ciphers after only a few fault injections. However, they require temporal and spatial accuracies of fault injection that were believed to rule out low-cost injection techniques such as voltage, frequency or temperature manipulation. We investigate selection of supply-voltage and temperature values that are suitable for high-precision fault injection even up to a single bit. The object of our studies is an ASIC implementation of the recently presented block cipher PRINCE, for which a two-stage fault attack scheme has been suggested lately. This attack requires, on average, about four to five fault injections in well-defined locations. We show by electrical simulations that voltage-temperature points exist for which faults show up at locations required for a successful attack with a likelihood of around 0.1%. This implies that the complete attack can be mounted by approximately 4,000 to 5,000 fault injection attempts, which is clearly feasible.

A Fast Characterization Method for Semi-invasive Fault Injection Attacks

“…To perform an invasive attack, it is required to remove at least part of the passivation layer to establish the contact between the probes and silicon [16]. Non-invasive attacks, on the other hand, mainly focus on investigating the settings that can be controlled externally [17], or passively measuring the running time, the cache behavior, the power consumption, and/or the electromagnetic radiation of the device through the package [18].…”

A Novel Approach of a Low-Cost Voltage Fault Injection Method for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: Design and Analysis

“…Thus, it can be deduced that each attempt carries a 50% probability of no effect, a 27.5% chance of a reboot failure, a 20.5% chance of a communication failure, and a 12% chance of a glitch. Finally, it is imperative to consider the temperature during the tests since it has a significant impact on the failure rate [ 13 , 28 , 30 ]. Despite restricting the temperature variation to between 19 °C and 23 °C, the outcomes might have been marginally affected.…”

“…However, these attacks are not necessarily limited to manipulating a single parameter. In [ 30 ], an FIA is executed combining voltage and heat glitches, while in [ 28 ], heat is combined with a clock glitch. Therefore, the parameters that are not part of the attack must be controlled to guarantee the expected result.…”

How Practical Are Fault Injection Attacks, Really?

“…Precise high variations, or power spikes, modify the state of latches of flip-flops, influencing the control and data path logic of the circuit [25]. For example, if the voltage spike happens during memory reading, wrong data may be retrieved.…”