The importance of the final exponentiation in pairings when considering fault attacks

  • Authors:
  • Claire Whelan;Michael Scott

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9. Ireland;School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9. Ireland

  • Venue:
  • Pairing'07 Proceedings of the First international conference on Pairing-Based Cryptography
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We investigate the possibilities for injecting faults on pairings and assess their consequences. We assess the effect of faults that seek to corrupt the data being operated on and show that pairings with either no or a straightforward final exponentiation are less secure than pairings with a more complex final exponentiation when considering such fault attacks. As evidence, we describe two types of fault attacks on the Weil and η pairing that recover the secret point, which cannot be applied to the Tate pairing. This can be accredited to its more complex final exponentiation.