Fault Sensitivity Analysis at Design Time

Side channel attacks represent a prime threat to the security of modern digital electronic systems. Among the different attack strategies, exploiting the information leaked by the resiliency of the device to harsh working conditions has recently emerged as an exploitable mean to retrieve secret keys held in a secure device. In this chapter we will provide an introduction to the Fault Sensitivity Analysis (FSA) attack technique, together with a design time evaluation of it on two different AES S-Boxes designs. Since a critical point of performing an FSA based attack is to choose a proper model for the expected failure trend of the device, we will delineate two different approaches, one based on an a-priori modeling of it, while the other exploits an a-posteriori strategy.