Differential Fault Attack on HE-Friendly Stream Ciphers: Masta, Pasta, and Elisabeth
Weizhe Wang, Deng Tang · IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2025
In this paper, we propose the Differential Fault Attack (DFA) on three Homomorphic Encryption (HE) friendly stream ciphers Masta, Pasta, and Elisabeth. Both Masta and Pasta are Rasta-like ciphers with publicly derived and pseudo-random affine layers. The design of Elisabeth is an extension of FLIP and FiLIP, following the group filter permutator paradigm. All these three ciphers operate on elements over ℤpor ℤ2n, rather than ℤ2. We can recover the secret keys of all the targeted ciphers through DFA. In particular, for Elisabeth, we present a new method to determine the filtering path, which is vital to make the attack practical. Our attacks on various instances of Masta are practical and require only one block of keystream and a single word-based fault. By injecting three word-based faults, we can theoretically mount DFA on two instances of Pasta, Pasta-3 and Pasta-4. For Elisabeth-4, the only instance of the Elisabeth family, we present two DFAs in which we inject four bit-based faults or a single word-based fault. With 15000 normal and faulty keystream words, the DFA on Elisabeth-4 can be completed in just a few minutes.