Fault-based attacks on cryptographic hardware

Mobile and embedded systems increasingly process sensitive data, ranging from personal information including health records or financial transactions to parameters of technical systems such as car engines. Cryptographic circuits are employed to protect these data from unauthorized access and manipulation. Fault-based attacks are a relatively new threat to system integrity. They circumvent the protection by inducing faults into the hardware implementation of cryptographic functions, thus affecting encryption and/or decryption in a controlled way. By doing so, the attacker obtains supplementary information that she can utilize during cryptanalysis to derive protected data, such as secret keys. In the recent years, a large number of fault-based attacks and countermeasures to protect cryptographic circuits against them have been developed. However, isolated techniques for each individual attack are no longer sufficient, and a generic protective strategy is lacking.