Fault Based Cryptanalysis of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

TLDR: An implemen- tation independent fault attack on AES is presented, able to deter- mine the complete 128-bit secret key of a sealed tamper-proof smart- card by generating 128 faulty cipher texts.

Abstract: In this paper we describe several fault attacks on the Ad- vanced Encryption Standard (AES). First, using optical/eddy current fault induction attacks as recently publicly presented by Skorobogatov, Anderson and Quisquater, Samyde (SA,QS), we present an implemen- tation independent fault attack on AES. This attack is able to deter- mine the complete 128-bit secret key of a sealed tamper-proof smart- card by generating 128 faulty cipher texts. Second, we present several implementation-dependent fault attacks on AES. These attacks rely on the observation that due to the AES's known timing analysis vulnera- bility (as pointed out by Koeune and Quisquater (KQ)), any implemen- tation of the AES must ensure a data independent timing behavior for the so called AES's xtime operation. We present fault attacks on AES based on various timing analysis resistant implementations of the xtime- operation. Our strongest attack in this direction uses a very liberal fault model and requires only 256 faulty encryptions to determine a 128-bit key.