Fault Attacks on Symmetric Cryptography
Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Sayandeep Saha · 2025
Fault Attacks (FAs) are especially popular in the context of block ciphers – the most widespread symmetric-key primitive. This chapter sheds light on the state-of-the-art block cipher FA. Single-byte faults are fairly easy to generate with modern fault injection setups. However, there are situations where faults are not always single-byte. Several efforts have been made to address the shortcomings of detection countermeasures. We may observe that the error-check operation is one of the weakest points. One way of removing this weakness is to avoid an explicit check operation. Statistical ineffective fault attack (SIFA) is one of the most recent inclusions in the arsenal of FAs. While SIFA exploits this for generating bias in the faulty state distributions, other exploitation is also feasible. The chapter presents one such exploitation technique, named fault template attacks.