A unified formalism for side-channel and fault attacks on cryptographic circuits

Abstract : Security is a key component for information technologies and communication. Security is a very large research area involved in the whole information technology, related to both hardware and software. This paper focuses on hardware security, and more specifically on hardware cryptanalysis whose aim is to extract confidential information (such as encryption keys) from cryptographic circuits. Many physical cryptanalysis techniques have been proposed in the last ten years but they always belong to one of those very distinct categories: fault and side channel attacks. In this article, a formal link between these two categories is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a wide class of attacks is described in such a generic manner.