Improved Fault Attack Against Eta Pairing

Abstract In recent years, an increasing number of cryptographic protocols based on bilinear pairings have been developed. With the enhancement of implementation efficiency, the algorithms of pairings are usually embedded in identity aware devices such as smartcards. Although many fault attacks and countermeasures for public key and elliptic curve cryptographic systems are known, the security of pairing based cryptography against the fault attacks has not been studied extensively. In this paper, we present an improved fault attack against the Eta pairing and generalize the attack to general loop iteration. We show that whatever the position of the secret point is, it can be recovered through solving the non-linear system obtained after the fault attack

Failure of the Point Blinding Countermeasure Against Fault Attack in Pairing-Based Cryptography

Article published in the proceedings of the C2SI conference, May 2015.Pairings are mathematical tools that have been proven to be very useful in the construction of many cryptographic protocols. Some of these protocols are suitable for implementation on power constrained devices such as smart cards or smartphone which are subject to side channel attacks. In this paper, we analyse the efficiency of the point blinding countermeasure in pairing based cryptography against side channel attacks. In particular,we show that this countermeasure does not protect Miller's algorithm for pairing computation against fault attack. We then give recommendation for a secure implementation of a pairing based protocol using the Miller algorithm

A Practical Second-Order Fault Attack against a Real-World Pairing Implementation

Several fault attacks against pairing-based cryptography have been described theoretically in recent years. Interestingly, none of these have been practically evaluated. We accomplished this task and prove that fault attacks against pairing-based cryptography are indeed possible and are even practical — thus posing a serious threat. Moreover, we successfully conducted a second-order fault attack against an open source implementation of the eta pairing on an AVR XMEGA A1. We injected the first fault into the computation of the Miller Algorithm and applied the second fault to skip the final exponentiation completely. We introduce a low-cost setup that allowed us to generate multiple independent faults in one computation. The setup implements these faults by clock glitches which induce instruction skips. With this setup we conducted the first practical fault attack against a complete pairing computation

Enhancing an embedded processor core for efficient and isolated execution of cryptographic algorithms

We propose enhancing a reconfigurable and extensible embedded RISC processor core with a protected zone for isolated execution of cryptographic algorithms. The protected zone is a collection of processor subsystems such as functional units optimized for high-speed execution of integer operations, a small amount of local memory for storing sensitive data during cryptographic computations, and special-purpose and cryptographic registers to execute instructions securely. We outline the principles for secure software implementations of cryptographic algorithms in a processor equipped with the proposed protected zone. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed zone by implementing the most-commonly used cryptographic algorithms in the protected zone; namely RSA, elliptic curve cryptography, pairing-based cryptography, AES block cipher, and SHA-1 and SHA-256 cryptographic hash functions. In terms of time efficiency, our software implementations of cryptographic algorithms running on the enhanced core compare favorably with equivalent software implementations on similar processors reported in the literature. The protected zone is designed in such a modular fashion that it can easily be integrated into any RISC processor. The proposed enhancements for the protected zone are realized on an FPGA device. The implementation results on the FPGA confirm that its area overhead is relatively moderate in the sense that it can be used in many embedded processors. Finally, the protected zone is useful against cold-boot and micro-architectural side-channel attacks such as cache-based and branch prediction attacks

Integrating emerging cryptographic engineering research and security education

Unlike traditional embedded systems such as secure smart cards, emerging secure deeply embedded systems, e.g., implantable and wearable medical devices, have larger “attack surface”. A security breach in such systems which are embedded deeply in human bodies or objects would be life-threatening, for which adopting traditional solutions might not be practical due to tight constraints of these often-battery-powered systems. Unfortunately, although emerging cryptographic engineering research mechanisms have started solving this critical problem, university education (at both graduate and undergraduate level) lags comparably. One of the pivotal reasons for such a lag is the multi-disciplinary nature of the emerging security bottlenecks (mathematics, engineering, science, and medicine, to name a few). Based on the aforementioned motivation, in this paper, we present an effective research and education integration strategy to overcome this issue at Rochester Institute of Technology. Moreover, we present the results of more than one year implementation of the presented strategy at graduate level through “side-channel analysis attacks” case studies. The results of the presented work show the success of the presented methodology while pinpointing the challenges encountered compared to traditional embedded system security research/teaching integration

Efficient and Secure ECDSA Algorithm and its Applications: A Survey

Public-key cryptography algorithms, especially elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)and elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) have been attracting attention frommany researchers in different institutions because these algorithms provide security andhigh performance when being used in many areas such as electronic-healthcare, electronicbanking,electronic-commerce, electronic-vehicular, and electronic-governance. These algorithmsheighten security against various attacks and the same time improve performanceto obtain efficiencies (time, memory, reduced computation complexity, and energy saving)in an environment of constrained source and large systems. This paper presents detailedand a comprehensive survey of an update of the ECDSA algorithm in terms of performance,security, and applications