International Journal of Parallel Programming | 2019
Editorial: Special Issue on Side-Channel and Fault Analysis of High-Performance Computing Platforms
Abstract
Classically, Side Channel Attack (SCA) and Fault Attack (FA) are the two passive and active forms of physical attacks geared toward secret key extraction and access control mechanisms bypass. In the past decade, side channel attacks have been more on the center of attention, due to the practicality of launching the attack.More recently, due to new forms of such attacks applicable beyond the domain of cryptography and cryptographic hardware, SCA and FA have grown to be a threat for the semiconductor industry [1–4]. In SCA for cryptography, the adversary is an observer of the physical information leaked during the execution of a target cryptographic software or hardware. This information could be leaked via data dependent fluctuation of power, voltage, temperature, electromagnetic radiations, execution time. The adversary correlates the observations to the operations executed in the target to reveal assets or other confidential information, e.g., secret keys. In FA for cryptography, the adversary has very accurate mathematical assumptions on the fault model. The fault model is the mathematical assumption on the effect of fault injection on the target, on which the accuracy and success of the fault attack post-processing step depends. Due to all these assumptions without considering the fault injection tool, the target device and its accuracy, fault attacks have been behind in the race of security threats. However, over the past decade, an effort began towardsmore practical fault attacks. Examples of these efforts are Fault Sensitivity Analysis [5], Differential Fault Intensity Analysis (DFIA) [6], and DERA [7]. These attacks tried to gradually eliminate mathematical assumptions from the fault attack process, making it more practical. As an example, DFIA considered the natural behavior of the circuit under fault injection as expected behavior for further post-processing. These attacks rely on the concept of fault biasness. As a result of the above-mentioned efforts, FA too have become a viable threat and several research ideas towards countermeasures have been also progressed over the past years. The research community have gone through several phases for physical attacks.