Fault Injection to Reverse Engineer DES-like Cryptosystems

Abstract : This paper presents a fault injection attack in order to reverse engineer unknown s-boxes of a DES-like cryptosystem. It is a sig-nicant improvement of the FIRE attack presented by San Pedro et al. which uses dierentials between s-boxes outputs. Since injecting faults on a cryptographic circuit may irreversibly damage the device, our aim has been to minimise the number of faults needed. We show that by considering faults in the penultimate round instead of last round, twice less faults are needed to reverse the s-boxes. Our attack requires no a priori knowledge on the s-boxes. However, if we assume that s-boxes satisfy some selected properties, then our attack can be made even more ecient, by a factor of two. Finally our attack needs four times less faults.