Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/782

Precise Fault-Injections using Voltage and Temperature Manipulation for Differential Cryptanalysis

Raghavan Kumar and Philipp Jovanovic and Ilia Polian

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.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / fault-based attacks, differential fault analysis, PRINCE, block cipher, voltage manipulation, temperature manipulation

Original Publication (with minor differences): On-Line Testing Symposium (IOLTS), 2014 IEEE 20th International
DOI: 10.1109/IOLTS.2014.6873670

Date: received 2 Oct 2014, last revised 6 Oct 2014

Contact author: jovanovic at fim uni-passau de

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20141006:214052 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/782

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