A survey of Fault Attacks in Pairing Based Cryptography

Article published in the journal Cryptography and Communications http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12095-014-0114-5The latest implementations of pairings allow efficient schemes for Pairing Based Cryptography. These make the use of pairings suitable for small and constrained devices (smart phones, smart cards.. .) in addition to more powerful platforms. As for any cryptographic algorithm which may be deployed in insecure locations, these implementations must be secure against physical attacks, and in particular fault attacks. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art of fault attacks against pairing algorithms, more precisely fault attacks against the Miller algorithm and the final exponentiation which are the two parts of a pairing calculation.