A survey of Fault attacks in Pairing Based Cryptography

Nadia El Mrabet (1, 2, 3) , Ronan Lashermes (4) , Jacques Jean-Alain Fournier (5) , Louis Goubin (6, 7)

1 SAS-ENSMSE - Département Systèmes et Architectures Sécurisés
2 LIASD - Laboratoire d'Informatique Avancée de Saint-Denis
3 Mines Saint-Étienne MSE - École des Mines de Saint-Étienne
4 TAMIS - Threat Analysis and Mitigation for Information Security
5 Laboratoire Systèmes et Architectures Sécurisés (LSAS)
6 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
7 UVSQ - Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

The latest implementations of pairings allow efficient schemes for Pairing Based Cryptography. These make the use of pairings suitable for small and constrained devices (smart phones, smart cards{\ldots}) in addition to more powerful platforms. As for any cryptographic algorithm which may be deployed in insecure locations, these implementations must be secure against physical attacks, and in particular fault attacks. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art of fault attacks against pairing algorithms, more precisely fault attacks against the Miller algorithm and the final exponentiation which are the two parts of a pairing calculation.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Nadia El Mrabet, Ronan Lashermes, Jacques Jean-Alain Fournier, Louis Goubin. A survey of Fault attacks in Pairing Based Cryptography. Cryptography and Communications - Discrete Structures, Boolean Functions and Sequences , 2015, 7 (1), pp.185--205. ⟨10.1007/s12095-014-0114-5⟩. ⟨hal-01579820⟩