Abstract
We concern security of shrinking generator against fault attacks. While this pseudorandom bitstream generator is cryptographically strong and well suited for hardware implementations, especially for cheap artefacts, we show that using it for the devices that are not fault resistant is risky. That is, even if a device concerned is tamper-proof, generating random faults and analyzing the results may reveal secret keys stored inside the device.
For the attack we flip a random bit and observe propagation of errors. The attack uses peculiar properties of the shrinking generator and presents a new kind of threats for designs based on combining weaker generators. In particular, it indicates that potentially all designs based on combining LFSR generators might be practically weak due to slow propagation of errors in a single LFSR.
This work was supported by Polish Ministry of Science and Education, grant 3T11C 011 26. It was finalized within a project partially supported by EU within the 7th Framework Programme under contract 215270 (FRONTS). An extended abstract of this paper appeared as Dagstuhl report urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-6117.
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Gomułkiewicz, M., Kutyłowski, M., Wlaź, P. (2008). Random Fault Attack against Shrinking Generator. In: Fekete, S.P. (eds) Algorithmic Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks. ALGOSENSORS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5389. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92862-1_8
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