A successful fault attack on an Integrated Circuit Card (ICC) or smartcard requires two steps: fault injection and the fault exploitation. The first step consists in injecting a fault at the appropriate time during the process. Fault injection is very dependent on the hardware and therefore the ICC. The second step consists in exploiting the erroneous result or unexpected behavior. Fault exploitation depends on the software design and implementation. In the case of an algorithm it will also depend on its specification since the fault exploitation will be combined with cryptanalysis most of the time. Depending on the type of analysis performed, the fault injection will have to be done at a precise instant or roughly in a given period of time.
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References
Boneh, Dan, Richard A. DeMillo, and Richard J. Lipton (1997). “On the importance of checking cryptographic protocols for faults.” Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT'97, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1233, ed. W. Fumy. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 37–51.
Joye, Marc, Arjen K. Lenstra, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater (1999). “Chinese remaindering cryptosystems in the presence of faults.” Journal of Cryptology, 12 (4), 241–245.
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© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing
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Benoît, O. (2005). Fault Attack. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_157
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