Paper 2014/492

Fault attacks on pairing-based protocols revisited

Sanjit Chatterjee and Koray Karabina and Alfred Menezes

Abstract

Several papers have studied fault attacks on computing a pairing value e(P,Q), where P is a public point and Q is a secret point. In this paper, we observe that these attacks are in fact effective only on a small number of pairing-based protocols, and that too only when the protocols are implemented with specific symmetric pairings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the fault attacks on a public-key encryption scheme, an identity-based encryption scheme, and an oblivious transfer protocol when implemented with a symmetric pairing derived from a supersingular elliptic curve with embedding degree 2.