A practical fault attack on square and multiply

Abstract

In order to provide security for a device, cryptographic algorithms are implemented on them. Even devices using a cryptographically secure algorithm may be vulnerable to implementation attacks like side channel analysis or fault attacks. Most fault attacks on RSA concentrate on the vulnerability of the Chinese Remainder Theorem to fault injections. A few other attacks on RSA which do not use this speed-up technique have been published. Nevertheless, these attacks require a quite precise fault injection like a bit flip or target a special operation without any possibility to check if the fault was injected in the intended way, like in safe-error attacks. In this paper we propose a new attack on square and multiply, based on a manipulation of the control flow. Furthermore, we show how to realize this attack in practice using non-invasive spike attacks and discuss impacts of different side channel analysis countermeasures on our attack. The attack was performed using low cost equipment. © 2008 IEEE.