J-DFA: A Novel Approach for Robust Differential Fault Analysis

Abstract

Fault attacks are among the most effective techniquesto break real implementations of cryptographic algorithms. They usually require some kind of knowledge bythe attacker on the effect of the faults on the target device, which in practice turns to be a poorly reliable informationtypically affected by uncertainty. This paper is devoted toaddress this problem by softening the a-priori knowledge on the injection technique needed by the attacker in the contextof Differential Fault Analysis (DFA). We conceive an originalsolution, named J-DFA, based on translating the stage ofdifferential cryptanalysis of DFA attacks into terms of fittingmultiple models to data corrupted by outliers. Specifically, wetailor J-Linkage algorithm [9] to the fault analysis. In order toshow the effectiveness of J-DFA and its benefits in practicalscenarios, we applied the technique under different attackconditions.