Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.
FAULT ATTACK RESISTANT CRYPTOGRAPHIC SYSTEMS AND METHODS

Abstract:

Described herein are systems and methods that prevent against fault injection attacks. In various embodiments this is accomplished by taking advantage of the fact that an attacker cannot utilize a result that has been faulted to recover a secret. By using infective computation, an error is propagated in a loop such that the faulted value will provide to the attacker no useful information or information from which useful information may be extracted. Faults from a fault attack will be so large that a relatively large number of bits will change. As a result, practically no secret information can be extracted by restoring bits.