Paper 2017/1082

Instruction Duplication: Leaky and Not Too Fault-Tolerant!

Lucian Cojocar, Kostas Papagiannopoulos, and Niek Timmers

Abstract

Fault injection attacks alter the intended behavior of micro- controllers, compromising their security. These attacks can be mitigated using software countermeasures. A widely-used software-based solution to deflect fault attacks is instruction duplication and n-plication. We explore two main limitations with these approaches: first, we examine the effect of instruction duplication under fault attacks, demonstrating that as fault tolerance mechanism, code duplication does not provide a strong protection in practice. Second, we show that instruction duplication increases side-channel leakage of sensitive code regions using a multivariate exploitation technique both in theory and in practice.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. CARDIS 2017
Keywords
side channel analysisfault injectionduplicationinfection
Contact author(s)
kostaspap88 @ gmail com
History
2017-11-10: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/1082
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/1082,
      author = {Lucian Cojocar and Kostas Papagiannopoulos and Niek Timmers},
      title = {Instruction Duplication: Leaky and Not Too Fault-Tolerant!},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/1082},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1082}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1082}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.