Can Knowledge Regarding the Presence of Countermeasures Against Fault Attacks Simplify Power Attacks on Cryptographic Devices?

Side-channel attacks are nowadays a serious concern when implementing cryptographic algorithms. Powerful ways for gaining information about the secret key as well as various countermeasures against such attacks have been recently developed. Although it is well known that such attacks can exploit information leaked from different sources, most prior works have only addressed the problem of protecting a cryptographic device against a single type of attack. Consequently, there is very little knowledge on how a scheme for protecting a device against one type of side-channel attack may affect its vulnerability to other types of side-channel attacks. In this paper we focus on devices that include protection against fault injection attacks (using different error detection schemes) and explore whether the presence of such fault detection circuits affects the resistance against attacks based on power analysis. Using the AES S-Box as an example, we performed attacks on the unprotected implement...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DFT
• Authors: Francesco Regazzoni, Thomas Eisenbarth, Luca Breveglieri, Paolo Ienne, Israel Koren
• Keywords: DFT 2008, Error Detection, Error Detection Circuitry, Side-channel Attacks, VLSI