Precise methods for distinguishing S‐box faults in laser injection attacks
Fan Zhang, Yiran Zhang, Huilong Jiang, Xiang Ping Zhu, Feng Lin, Kui Ren · Electronics Letters · 2019
Fault attack is a type of active attack which retrieves the secret key by injecting computational faults. Laser is one of the most common fault injection methods. When attacking substitution‐permutation networks‐ciphers, S‐box is often chosen as the laser injection target. However, the adversary has to know whether the S‐box is corrupted or not after each injection, which was difficult in real‐world attacks. Two analysing methods to distinguish the S‐box faults for different ciphers is proposed in this Letter. A laser‐based physical experiment is carried out to verify the authors' methods on Advanced Encryption Standard and PRESENT ciphers on an ATmega163L microcontroller. Experimental results show that their methods can precisely distinguish S‐box faults merely using dozens of ciphertexts.