Practical Persistent Fault Attacks on AES with Instruction Skip

Viet Sang Nguyen; Vincent Grosso; Pierre-Louis Cayrel

doi:10.62056/a60l5wol7

Practical Persistent Fault Attacks on AES with Instruction Skip

Authors

Viet Sang Nguyen, Vincent Grosso, Pierre-Louis Cayrel

Viet Sang Nguyen

Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Institut d Optique Graduate School, Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR 5516, Saint-Etienne, France
viet dot sang dot nguyen at univ-st-etienne dot fr

Vincent Grosso

Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Institut d Optique Graduate School, Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR 5516, Saint-Etienne, France
vincent dot grosso at univ-st-etienne dot fr

Pierre-Louis Cayrel

Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Institut d Optique Graduate School, Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR 5516, Saint-Etienne, France
pierre dot louis dot cayrel at univ-st-etienne dot fr

Abstract

Persistent Fault Attacks (PFA) have emerged as an active research area in embedded cryptography. This attack exploits faults in one or multiple constants stored in memory, typically targeting S-box elements. In the literature, such persistent faults primarily induced by bit flips in storage, often achieved through laser fault injection techniques. In this paper, we demonstrate that persistent faults can also be induced through instruction skips, which can easily be achieved with almost any fault injection methods (e.g., voltage/clock glitching, electromagnetism). Specifically, we target AES implementations that dynamically generate the S-box table at runtime, during the initialization phase, before executing the first AES operation. We illustrate this with an attack on the AES implementation in the MbedTLS library, where a clock glitch is inserted during the S-box generation. Secondly, we introduce, to our knowledge, the first PFA that targets a constant other than the S-box elements. We show that faulting a round constant involved in the AES key schedule is sufficient to recover the key by a differential analysis. Compared to previous PFAs that rely on statistical analysis requiring hundreds to thousands of ciphertexts, our approach needs only three correct-faulty ciphertexts pairs. We showcase this attack with an experiment on the MbedTLS AES implementation, using a clock glitch in the round constant generation.

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PDF Open access

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62056/a60l5wol7

History

Submitted: 2025-01-14
Accepted: 2025-03-11
Published: 2025-04-08

How to cite

Viet Sang Nguyen, Vincent Grosso, and Pierre-Louis Cayrel, Practical Persistent Fault Attacks on AES with Instruction Skip. IACR Communications in Cryptology, vol. 2, no. 1, Apr 08, 2025, doi: 10.62056/a60l5wol7.

License

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

@article{10.62056/a60l5wol7,
         author={Viet Sang Nguyen and Vincent Grosso and Pierre-Louis Cayrel},
         title={Practical Persistent Fault Attacks on {AES} with Instruction Skip},
         volume={2},
         number={1},
         year={2025},
         date={2025-04-08},
         issn={3006-5496},
         doi={10.62056/a60l5wol7},
         journal={{IACR} Communications in Cryptology},
         publisher={International Association for Cryptologic Research}
}

TY - JOUR
AU - Viet Sang Nguyen
AU - Vincent Grosso
AU - Pierre-Louis Cayrel
PY - 2025
TI - Practical Persistent Fault Attacks on AES with Instruction Skip
JF - IACR Communications in Cryptology
JA - CIC
VL - 2
IS - 1
DO - 10.62056/a60l5wol7
UR - https://doi.org/10.62056/a60l5wol7
AB - <p>Persistent Fault Attacks (PFA) have emerged as an active research area in embedded cryptography. This attack exploits faults in one or multiple constants stored in memory, typically targeting S-box elements. In the literature, such persistent faults primarily induced by bit flips in storage, often achieved through laser fault injection techniques. In this paper, we demonstrate that persistent faults can also be induced through instruction skips, which can easily be achieved with almost any fault injection methods (e.g., voltage/clock glitching, electromagnetism). Specifically, we target AES implementations that dynamically generate the S-box table at runtime, during the initialization phase, before executing the first AES operation. We illustrate this with an attack on the AES implementation in the MbedTLS library, where a clock glitch is inserted during the S-box generation. Secondly, we introduce, to our knowledge, the first PFA that targets a constant other than the S-box elements. We show that faulting a round constant involved in the AES key schedule is sufficient to recover the key by a differential analysis. Compared to previous PFAs that rely on statistical analysis requiring hundreds to thousands of ciphertexts, our approach needs only three correct-faulty ciphertexts pairs. We showcase this attack with an experiment on the MbedTLS AES implementation, using a clock glitch in the round constant generation. </p>
ER -

Viet Sang Nguyen, Vincent Grosso, and Pierre-Louis Cayrel, Practical Persistent Fault Attacks on AES with Instruction Skip. IACR Communications in Cryptology, vol. 2, no. 1, Apr 08, 2025, doi: 10.62056/a60l5wol7.