International Association
for Cryptologic Research

State-of-the-art fault-based cryptanalysis methods are capable of breaking most

recent ciphers after only a few fault injections. However, they require temporal

and spatial accuracies of fault injection that were believed to rule out

low-cost injection techniques such as voltage, frequency or temperature

manipulation. We investigate selection of supply-voltage and temperature values

that are suitable for high-precision fault injection even up to a single bit.

The object of our studies is an ASIC implementation of the recently presented

block cipher PRINCE, for which a two-stage fault attack scheme has been

suggested lately. This attack requires, on average, about four to five fault

injections in well-defined locations. We show by electrical simulations that

voltage-temperature points exist for which faults show up at locations required

for a successful attack with a likelihood of around 0.1\\%. This implies that the

complete attack can be mounted by approximately 4,000 to 5,000 fault injection

attempts, which is clearly feasible.