Fault Attacks against a Cellular Automata Based Stream Cipher

José Carrijo, Anderson C. A. Nascimento, Rafael Tonicelli, Vinícius de Morais Alves · 2011

This paper presents fault attacks against a cellular automata based stream cipher. A fault attack assumes that the adversary is able to physically operate the cryptographic device and insert some errors into it. As a consequence, the adversary can induce faulty results into the device and use them to recover the stored secret key. By using this approach we provide extremely efficient and practical cryptanalytic methods: by injecting n/2 + n2/32 faults we recover the n-bit secret key from a stream cipher based on cellular automaton rule 30. To the best of our knowledge this is the first application of fault attacks against cellular automata based stream ciphers.

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