Fault-Based Attack of RSA Authentication

For any computing system to be secure, both hardware and software have to be trusted. If the hardware layer in a secure system is compromised, not only it would be possible to extract secret information about the software, but it would be extremely hard for the software to detect that an attack is underway. In this work we detail a complete end-to-end fault-attack on a microprocessor system and practically demonstrate how hardware vulnerabilities can be exploited to target secure systems. We developed a theoretical attack to the RSA signature algorithm, and we realized it in practice against an FPGA implementation of the system under attack. To perpetrate the attack, we inject transient faults in the target machine by regulating the voltage supply of the system. Thus, our attack does not require access to the victim system's internal components, but simply proximity to it.

The paper makes three important contributions: first, we develop a systematic fault-based attack on the modular exponentiation algorithm for RSA. Second, we expose and exploit a severe flaw on the implementation of the RSA signature algorithm on OpenSSL, a widely used package for SSL encryption and authentication. Third, we report on the first physical demonstration of a fault-based security attack of a computer microprocessor system running unmodified production software: we attack the original OpenSSL authentication library running on a SPARC Linux system implemented on FPGA, and extract the system's 1024-bit RSA private key in approximately 100 hours.