Vulnerability Analysis Against Fault Attack in terms of the Timing Behavior of Fault Injection

Abstract

Security of implemented cryptographic systems has been faces with the serious concerns in recent years. Nowadays, side channel attacks especially differential fault attacks are known as very power threats. Therefore, it is essential to have a method for assessing the vulnerability of a hardware against these kind of attacks. Fault attack is known as a powerful attack for accessing the secret data from crypto-systems. This paper introduces the concept of Fault Confidence Window (FCW) to vulnerability analysis of a general system against the fault attack. FCW investigates the conditions that a transient fault can be exploitable by attackers. Our analyses determines the properties of fault and victim circuits that tend to have an effective attack. Result of the proposed analysis can help the designers to harden their system against transient fault attacks.