Multi-Level Formal Analysis, A New Direction for Fault Injection Attack?
Résumé
Fault injection attack is an extremely pow-
erful technique to extract secrets from an embedded
system. Since their introduction, a large number of
countermeasures have been proposed. Unfortunately,
they suffer from two major drawbacks: a very high cost
on system performance, and a security frequently ques-
tioned. The first point can be explained by their design,
based on techniques from Reliability domain, which re-
sult in solutions protecting against fault models either
highly improbable in a context of attack, or that do
not permit secret extraction. At the opposite, the sec-
ond point is due to the use of an incomplete attacker
model for the security evaluation at design step. In this
paper, we propose a new approach: multi-level formal
verification, based on models encompassing the capabil-
ities of the attacker, the susceptibility to faults of the
hardware platform hosting the implementation, and the
constraints imposed by the algorithm used for secret
extraction. We first explain that the success of a fault
injection attack depends solely on races between signals,
which can be analyzed automatically. Then, we perform
a multi-level evaluation on a hardware implementation
of AES-128, which shows that the overhead of a coun-
termeasure can be divided by eight while maintaining
an almost identical level of security. Finally, we extend
the model to electromagnetic injection.