Fault attacks on pairing-based cryptography

Abstract

Over the last ten years, the use of bilinear maps or “pairings” as building block primitives within cryptographic schemes has become commonplace. This trend has been supported by insight into their security properties and methods for efficient evaluation; the latter aspect has provided results that now allow even embedded devices to execute pairing-based schemes. However, this raises questions relating to physical security in the same way as for RSA- and ECC-based schemes. Specifically, the secure deployment of a pairing-based scheme necessitates the study of related fault attacks. This chapter attempts to survey the state of the art in this respect; it aims to describe the main results in this area, and give an overview of potential countermeasures.