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Differential Fault Analysis

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Encyclopedia of Cryptography, Security and Privacy

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Synonyms

Collision fault analysis; Fault analysis, Fault attacks, Fault injection

Definitions

Differential fault analysis is an active attack against cryptographic implementations. The goal is to induce faults during a cryptographic operation to infer private information (e.g., a decryption key).

Background

Cryptographic systems should not only be resistant to cryptanalysis, but they should also be resistant to implementation attacks, including side-channel and fault attacks. Differential fault analysis was developed by Boneh et al. (2001) and extended to the symmetric-key setting by Biham and Shamir (1997). The principle idea behind fault attacks consists in modifying the normal behavior of a cryptographic implementation in order to get a faulty output. Then from one or more faulty outputs, the attacker tries to infer some information about the secret key. Examples of practical fault injection are described in Skorobogatov and Anderson (2002) and Bar-El et al. (2006). When...

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References

  • Bar-El H, Choukri H, Naccache D, Tunstall M, Whelan C (2006) The sorcerer’s apprentice guide to fault attacks. Proc IEEE 94(2):370–382. https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2005.862424

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  • Biham E, Shamir A (1997) Differential fault analysis of secret key cryptosystems. In: Kaliski Jr BS (ed) Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO ’97. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1294. Springer, pp 513–525. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052259

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  • Boneh D, DeMillo RA, Lipton RJ (2001) On the importance of eliminating errors in cryptographic computations. J Cryptol 14(2):101–119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s001450010016. Earlier version appeared in Proceedings of EUROCRYPT ’97

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  • Tunstall M, Mukhopadhyay D, Ali S (2011) Differential fault analysis of the advanced encryption standard using a single fault. In: Ardagna CA, Zhou J (eds) Information Security Theory and Practice (WISTP 2011). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6633. Springer, pp 224–233. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21040-2_15

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zama, Paris, France

    Marc Joye

  2. Rambus Cryptography Research, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Michael Tunstall

Authors
  1. Marc Joye
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  2. Michael Tunstall
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc Joye .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, VA, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

  2. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Pierangela Samarati

  3. Google Inc, New York, NY, USA

    Moti Yung

Section Editor information

  1. Microelectronics Laboratory, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    François-Xavier Standaert

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Cite this entry

Joye, M., Tunstall, M. (2023). Differential Fault Analysis. In: Jajodia, S., Samarati, P., Yung, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography, Security and Privacy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27739-9_1707-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27739-9_1707-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-27739-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27739-9

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