inaccurate evaluation results if security evaluation in
space and time are separated.
Motivated by these challenges, we develop a
quantitative model to evaluate the security
considering both the sensitive time and space during
the algorithm operation for cryptographic ICs, which
is based on the proposed design for security test
(DFST) in (Shao et al., 2014) against fault injection
attacks with industrial automatic test equipment
(ATE). A three dimensions (3D) fault map in time
and space can be quickly and accurately obtained,
which helps to locate the error-prone region of
cryptographic ICs. The value representing the
security level can be calculated by the quantitative
model.
Compared to the existing security evaluation, the
main contributions of the proposed security
evaluation method are as follows:
Security evaluation is performed based DFST,
which helps to diagnose the fault occurrence
locations with high accuracy and fault occurrence
time period with high efficiency.
The quantitative model considers both the space
domain and the time domain, which could provide
intuitive understanding and comprehensive
evaluation of cryptographic ICs security against
fault injection attacks.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We
briefly introduce the background of fault injection
attacks on cryptographic ICs and security test of
cryptographic ICs with DFST in Section II. In Section
III, we present the evaluation flow based on DFST
method and present the quantitative model
considering both the space and the operation time. In
Section IV, a case study on two RSA implementations
is demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of the
quantitative evaluation model. The study is concluded
in Section V.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Fault Injection Attacks
Fault injection attackers aim to maliciously alter the
correct functioning of computing devices, and
analyze the faulty output to retrieve the secret
information, which been listed into Federal
Information Processing Standard FIPS 140-3,
Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules
(NIST, 2009), generally accepted as one of the
standard security evaluation methods. Fault injection
techniques can be classified in two main categories:
hardware fault injection, and software fault injection
(Ningfang et al., 2011).The hardware fault injection
are of the main interest in this paper, which include
variations in the external clock, variations in supply
voltages, laser illumination, X-rays and ion beams
radiation etc.
The hardware fault injection tools can be
classified by their (temporal and spatial) precision
and the cost (Kim and Quisquater, 2007).
With well-timed power spikes or dropdowns into
the supply line, it is possible to for the device to skip
specific instruction execution. The temporal precision
depends on the voltage drop/spike duration and
synchronization with the target device. Similarly,
altering the length of a single clock cycle may corrupt
data storage, which also requires relatively high
temporal precision.
Electromagnetic (EM) disturbances near the
device may induceddy currents in the circuit, causing
temporary alterations of the signal voltage level.
Laser beam and heavy ion micro beam can cause
abnormal behaviors on semiconductor devices
through single event effects (SEE), where a strong
radiation of a transistor may form a temporary
conductive channel in the dielectric, which, in turn,
may cause the logic circuit to switch state in a precise
and controlled manner.
2.2 Fault Attacks to Break
Cryptosystems
Fault injection has been reported effective on various
crypto modules. DES (Data Encryption Standard)
was reported vulnerable against fault injection attacks
at the15
th
round, an exclusive-OR (XOR) operation
between the correct and faulty cipher text will yield
the 15
th
round-sub keys. An exhaustive search of the
64 possible values of the corresponding substitution
will reveal the left 6-bitsubkey and thus the entire key
(Bar-El et al., 2006). A fault occurs on the 9
th
round
of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) before Mix
Column operation will also yield the round key
(Moradi et al., 2006).This paper will take the right-to-
left RSA binary implementation with Montgomery
modular multiplication as the example to illustrate the
principle of fault injection attacks.
RSA is one of the first practicable public-key
cryptosystems and is widely used for secure data
transmission, named after Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir
and Leonard Adleman (Rivest et al., 1978). In such a
crypto system, the encryption key is public and differs
from the decryption key which is private and kept
secret. Two distinct and large odd prime numbers p
and q are used to generate two key-pair values: the