Feasibility of fault analysis based on intentional electromagnetic interference

Abstract

This paper presents the feasibility of fault analysis using intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI). Fault analysis (FA) is a kind of implementation attack that intentionally extracts a secret key embedded in a secure device such as a smart card. An attacker injects a computational fault during the cryptographic calculation and he can extract a secret key. Recently, Hayashi et al. showed that temporal faults could be remotely injected during the cryptographic calculation using IEMI. They showed a case study in which an Advanced Standard Encryption (AES) secret key could be extracted through fault analysis. However, the characteristics of faults that can be induced by IEMI were not described. And, a threat of various FAs was not clear. In this paper, we examine in detail how the IEMI fault injection affects the fault occurrence of intermediate states in a cryptographic module and investigate the distribution of the IEMI generated faults. Furthermore, we classify previous FAs with respect to an attack model such as the type of faults needed to achieve a successful attack, and discuss the feasibility of FAs using IEMI based on the experimental results.