A Survey on Fault Attacks on Symmetric Key Cryptosystems

Abstract

Fault attacks are among the well-studied topics in the area of cryptography. These attacks constitute a powerful tool to recover the secret key used in the encryption process. Fault attacks work by forcing a device to work under non-ideal environmental conditions (such as high temperature) or external disturbances (such as glitch in the power supply) while performing a cryptographic operation. The recent trend shows that the amount of research in this direction—which ranges from attacking a particular primitive, proposing a fault countermeasure, to attacking countermeasures—has grown up substantially and is going to stay as an active research interest for the foreseeable future. Hence, it becomes apparent to have a comprehensive yet compact study of the (major) works. This work, which covers a wide spectrum in the present-day research on fault attacks that fall under the purview of the symmetric key cryptography, aims at fulfilling the absence of an up-to-date survey. We present mostly all aspects of the topic in a way that is not only understandable for a non-expert reader, but also helpful for an expert as a reference.