IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences
Online ISSN : 1745-1337
Print ISSN : 0916-8508
Special Section on Cryptography and Information Security
Laser-Induced Controllable Instruction Replacement Fault Attack
Junichi SAKAMOTODaisuke FUJIMOTOTsutomu MATSUMOTO
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2020 Volume E103.A Issue 1 Pages 11-20

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Abstract

To develop countermeasures against fault attacks, it is important to model an attacker's ability. The instruction skip model is a well-studied practical model for fault attacks on software. Contrastingly, few studies have investigated the instruction replacement model, which is a generalization of the instruction skip model, because replacing an instruction with a desired one is considered difficult. Some previous studies have reported successful instruction replacements; however, those studies concluded that such instruction replacements are not practical attacks because the outcomes of the replacements are uncontrollable. This paper proposes the concept of a controllable instruction replacement technique that uses the laser irradiation of flash memory. The feasibility of the proposed technique is demonstrated experimentally using a smartcard-type ARM SC100 microcontroller. Then, practical cryptosystem attacks that exploit the proposed technique are investigated. The targeted cryptosystems employ the AES with software-based anti-fault countermeasures. We demonstrate that an existing anti-instruction-skip countermeasure can be circumvented by replacing a critical instruction, e.g., a branch instruction to detect fault occurrence.

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© 2020 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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