Abstract
Localized semi-invasive optical fault attacks are nowadays considered to be out of reach for attackers with a limited budget. For this reason, they typically receive lower attention and priority during the security analysis of low-cost devices. Indeed, an optical fault injection setup typically requires expensive equipment which includes at least a laser station, a microscope, and a programmable X-Y table, all of which can quickly add up to several thousand euros. Additionally, a careful handling of toxic chemicals in a protected environment is required to decapsulate the chips under test and gain direct access to the die surface. In this work, we present a low-cost fault injection setup which is capable of producing localized faults in modern 8-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, does not require handling hazardous substances or wearing protective eyeware, and would set back an attacker only a couple hundred euros. Finally, we show that the type of faults which are obtained from such a low-cost setup can be exploited to successfully attack real-world cryptographic implementations, such that of the NSA’s Speck lightweight block cipher.
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Notes
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This duration accounts also for the discharging effects inside the LED and various parasitics, i.e. the light is emitted for a much shorter time.
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The back focal length is \(0.73356-0.5=0.23356\) mm .
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Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This work was performed while Oscar M. Guillen was a research assistant at the Chair of Security in Information Technology of the Technische Universität München.
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Appendix: Differential Fault Analysis of Speck
Appendix: Differential Fault Analysis of Speck
Speck is a family of block ciphers variable by different block and key sizes. The round function R(x, y) of Speck has a Feistel-like structure and is described by the following equation:
where \(\oplus \) denotes a bitwise XOR, \(+\) denotes an addition modulo \(2^{n}\), \(\ggg \alpha \) denotes the right circular shift with \(\alpha \) bits, \(\lll \beta \) denotes the left circular shift with \(\beta \) bits, x and y are the input n-bit words, and k is the round key.
The last round key \(k^{T-1}\) can be recovered by injecting random faults in the word \(y^{T-1}\) as proposed by Huo et al. in [9]. The fault propagates through the last round and the pairs of correct and faulty ciphertexts are collected. Then, a system of non linear equations on \(\mathbb {F}_2\) is constructed as a set of Differential Equations of Additions (DEAs). Finally, the system of DEAs is solved using a computer algebra system with the aid of Gröbner bases. According to [9], 5–8 pairs are needed on average to solve the system of DEAs, independently of the block size n.
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Guillen, O.M., Gruber, M., De Santis, F. (2017). Low-Cost Setup for Localized Semi-invasive Optical Fault Injection Attacks. In: Guilley, S. (eds) Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design. COSADE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10348. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64647-3_13
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