Fault Attack, Countermeasures on Pairing Based Cryptography

Bilinear pairing is a new and increasingly popular way of constructing cryptographic protocols. This has resulted in the development of Identity Based Encryption (IBE) that is ideally used in identity aware devices. The security of such devices using pairing algorithms against side-channel and fault attack has not been studied extensively. This paper examines the security of existing countermeasures and show their weakness against fault attacks. Subsequently, it proposes a new countermeasure that prevents such kind of attacks. The paper also discusses for the first time fault attacks and countermeasures against bilinear pairing in Edwards coordinates.