AutoFault: Towards Automatic Construction of Algebraic Fault Attacks
Jan Burchard, Maël Gay, Ange-Salomé Messeng Ekossono, Jan Horáček, Bernd Becker, Tobias Schubert, Martin Kreuzer, Ilia Polian · 2017
A prototype of the framework AutoFault, which automatically constructs fault-injection attacks for hardware realizations of ciphers, is presented. AutoFault can be used to quickly evaluate the resistance of security-critical hardware blocks to fault attacks and the adequacy of implemented countermeasures. The framework takes as inputs solely the circuit description of the cipher and the fault(s) and produces an algebraic formula that can be handed over to an external solver. In contrast to previous work, attacks constructed by AutoFault do not incorporate any cipher-specific cryptoanalytic derivations, making the framework accessible to users without cryptographic background. We report successful application of AutoFault in combination with a state-of-the-art SAT solver to LED-64 and to small-scale AES. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a state-of-the-art cipher (LED-64) was broken by a fault attack with no prior manual cryptanalysis whatsoever.