A Fault Attack on Pairing-Based Cryptography

Current fault attacks against public key cryptography focus on traditional schemes, such as RSA and ECC, and, to a lesser extent, on primitives such as XTR. However, bilinear maps, or pairings, have presented theorists with a new and increasingly popular way of constructing cryptographic protocols. Most notably, this has resulted in efficient methods for identity based encryption (IBE). Since identity-based cryptography seems an ideal partner for identity aware devices such as smart-cards, in this paper, we examine the security of concrete pairing instantiations in terms of fault attack

1 Introduction

The increasing ubiquity of computing devices is continuing to offer exciting new applications to consumers, but also multiplies the number of security issues a system designer must consider. Since such devices will be carried into and used in hostile environments and often house sensitive information, for example, identity-related tokens or financial information, the threat of attack is significant. This threat is magnified by both the potential pay-off and the level of anonymity that side-channel attacks allow.