Open AccessPrecise methods for distinguishing S‐box faults in laser injection attacks
Author(s) -
Zhang Fan,
Zhang Yiran,
Jiang Huilong,
Zhu Xiang,
Lin Feng,
Ren Kui
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
electronics letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.375
H-Index - 146
ISSN - 1350-911X
DOI - 10.1049/el.2019.2865
Subject(s) - fault injection , computer science , s box , block cipher , encryption , adversary , cryptography , permutation (music) , fault (geology) , key (lock) , microcontroller , embedded system , computer security , operating system , geology , physics , software , seismology , acoustics
Fault attack is a type of active attack which retrieves the secret key by injecting computational faults. Laser is one of the most common fault injection methods. When attacking substitution‐permutation networks‐ciphers, S‐box is often chosen as the laser injection target. However, the adversary has to know whether the S‐box is corrupted or not after each injection, which was difficult in real‐world attacks. Two analysing methods to distinguish the S‐box faults for different ciphers is proposed in this Letter. A laser‐based physical experiment is carried out to verify the authors' methods on Advanced Encryption Standard and PRESENT ciphers on an ATmega163L microcontroller. Experimental results show that their methods can precisely distinguish S‐box faults merely using dozens of ciphertexts.