On the power of fault sensitivity analysis and collision side-channel attacks in a combined setting

Abstract

At CHES 2010 two powerful new attacks were presented, namely the Fault Sensitivity Analysis and the Correlation Collision Attack. This paper shows how these ideas can be combined to create even stronger attacks. Two solutions are presented; both extract leakage information by the fault sensitivity analysis method while each one applies a slightly different collision attack to deduce the secret information without the need of any hypothetical leakage model. Having a similar fault injection method, one attack utilizes the non-uniform distribution of faulty ciphertext bytes while the other one exploits the data-dependent timing characteristics of the target combination circuit. The results when attacking several AES ASIC cores of the SASEBO LSI chips in different process technologies are presented. Successfully breaking the cores protected against DPA attacks using either gate-level countermeasures or logic styles indicates the strength of the attacks. © 2011 International Association for Cryptologic Research.