Defeating with Fault Injection a Combined Attack Resistant Exponentiation

• Published in: Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design pp. 32 - 45
• Main Authors: Feix, Benoit, Venelli, Alexandre
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Combined Attack; ECC; Embedded Exponentiation; Fault Analysis; RSA; Side-channel Analysis
• ISBN: 3642400256; 9783642400254
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-40026-1_3

Since the introduction of the side-channel and fault injection analysis late in the 90’s, implementing cryptographic standards on embedded devices has become a difficult challenge. Developers were obliged to add new appropriate countermeasures into their code. To prevent those separate threats, they often implemented countermeasures separately. The side-channel dedicated countermeasures were added to the algorithm when on the other hand specific protections against fault injections, like computation verifications, were implemented. However in 2007 Amiel et al.demonstrated that a single fault injection combined with simple side-channel analysis can defeat such a classical implementation. Then it became obvious that side-channel and fault countermeasures had to be designed together. In that vein Schmidt et al.published at Latincrypt 2010 an efficient exponentiation algorithm supposedly resistant against this combined attack category. Despite the clever design of these algorithms, we present here two new attacks that can defeat its security. Our first attack is a single fault injection scheme requiring only few faulted ciphertexts. The second one requires the combination of a single fault injection with a differential treatment. We also propose a more secure version of this algorithm that thwarts our attacks.