Improvements and recent updates of persistent fault analysis on block ciphers

Abstract

Persistence is an intrinsic nature of many errors yet has not been caught enough attractions for years. In this chapter, the feature of persistence is applied to fault attacks (FAs), and the persistent FA is proposed. Different from traditional FAs, adversaries can prepare the fault injection stage before the encryption stage, which relaxes the constraint of the tight-coupled time synchronization. The persistent fault analysis (PFA) is elaborated on different implementations of AES-128, specially fault-hardened implementations based on dual modular redundancy (DMR). Our experimental results show that PFA is quite simple and efficient in breaking these typical implementations. To show the feasibility and practicability of our attack, a case study is illustrated on a few countermeasures of masking. This work puts forward a new direction of FAs and can be extended to attack other implementations under more interesting scenarios.