Fault Attacks and Countermeasures

Contact: Michael Gruber

Fault-attacks represent a major threat to the security of cryptographic embedded devices. By actively perturbing the activity of a device, data dependent faulty behaviour can be observed.

The information leaked by a faulty computation can be exploited using several methods, based on analytical, statistical approaches.

Research topics:

Theoretical Fault Attacks

  • Differential Fault Attacks
  • Statistical Fault Attacks
  • Algebraic Fault Attacks
  • Implementation of countermeasures against fault attacks

Practical Fault Attacks

  • Electromagnetic Fault Injection
  • Forward Body Bias Injection
  • Localized Optical (low-cost) Fault Attacks

Course Offered:

Selected Publications

Gruber, Michael and Karl, Patrick and Sigl, Georg: Algebraic Fault Analysis of Subterranean 2.0. 2021 Workshop on Fault Detection and Tolerance in Cryptography (FDTC), 2021Milano, Italy

Gruber, Michael and Probst, Matthias and Karl, Patrick and Schamberger, Thomas and Tebelmann, Lars and Tempelmeier, Michael and Sigl, Georg: DOMREP – An Orthogonal Countermeasure for Arbitrary Order Side-Channel and Fault Attack Protection. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (16), 2021, 4321-4335

Karl, Patrick and Gruber, Michael: A Survey on the Application of Fault Analysis on Lightweight Cryptography. 2021 11th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS), IEEE, 2021Paris, France

Brunner, M. and Gruber, M. and Tempelmeier, M. and Sigl, G.: Logic Locking Induced Fault Attacks. 2020 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), 2020Limassol, CYPRUS

M. Gruber, M. Probst and M. Tempelmeier, Statistical Ineffective Fault Analysis of GIMLI 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), San Jose, CA, USA 2020

M. Gruber, M. Probst and M. Tempelmeier, Persistent Fault Analysis of OCB, DEOXYS and COLM, 2019 Workshop on Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography (FDTC), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2019, pp. 17-24. (slides, paper)

Gruber M., Selmke B. (2019) Differential Fault Attacks on KLEIN. In: Polian I., Stöttinger M. (eds) Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design. COSADE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11421. Springer, Cham (slides, paper)

Guillen O.M., Gruber M., De Santis F. (2017) Low-Cost Setup for Localized Semi-invasive Optical Fault Injection Attacks. In: Guilley S. (eds) Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design. COSADE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10348. Springer, Cham (code, slides, paper)

F. De Santis, O. M. Guillen, E. Sakic and G. Sigl, Ciphertext-Only Fault Attacks on PRESENT to appear in Third International Workshop on Lightweight Cryptography for Security & Privacy (LightSec 2014), September 2014, Istanbul, Turkey.