Differential Fault Analysis

摘要

Commercial ventures and financial institutions have proposed and are relying upon smartcards and other security processors as a method for storing and transacting electronic currency. As users begin to accept electronic wallets as a viable option for storing their assets, the security community has placed these devices under closer scrutiny. The idea of using computational faults to break tamper resistant cryptographic devices has been recently highlighted in lot of researches. Biham and Shamir named this form of attack as Differential Fault Analysis (DFA). This paper summarizes the existing research on DFA, describes and analyzes a differential attack on various algorithms like DES, RSA, IDEA, RC5, DSA and other vulnerable ciphers. This paper also discusses some of the ways to prevent the Differential Fault Analysis.