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
