FaultDroid

Abstract

Fault attacks belong to a potent class of implementation-based attacks that can compromise a crypto-device within a few milliseconds. Out of the large numbers of faults that can occur in the device, only a very few are exploitable in terms of leaking the secret key. Ignorance of this fact has resulted in countermeasures that have either significant overhead or inadequate protection. This article presents a framework, referred to as FaultDroid, for automated vulnerability analysis of fault attacks. It explores the entire fault attack space, identifies the single/multiple fault scenarios that can be exploited by a differential fault attack, rank-orders them in terms of criticality, and provides design guidance to mitigate the vulnerabilities at low cost. The framework enables a designer to automatically evaluate the fault attack vulnerabilities of a block cipher implementation and then incorporate efficient countermeasures. FaultDroid uses a formal model of fault attacks on a high-level specification of a block cipher and hence is equally applicable to both software and hardware implementation of the cipher. As case studies, we employ FaultDroid to comprehensively evaluate the fault scenarios in several common ciphers—AES, CLEFIA, CAMELLIA, SMS4, SIMON, PRESENT, and GIFT—and assess their vulnerability.