Paper 2014/782 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2014/782 ↗

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

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.