Fault Analysis of the ChaCha and Salsa Families of Stream Ciphers

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. We present a fault analysis study of the ChaCha and Salsa families of stream ciphers. We first show that attacks like differential fault analysis that are common in the block cipher setting are not applicable against these families of stream ciphers. Then we propose two novel fault attacks that can be used against any variant of the ciphers. We base our attacks on two different fault models: the stuck-at fault model and the biased fault model. Each of them is exploited differently by the attacker. If the attacker knows the plaintexts and the ciphertexts both fault models can be successfully exploited. If the ciphers operate on fixed yet unknown plaintexts only the biased fault model can be successfully exploited. We evaluate exemplary attacks using both models in simulation. Their low complexity confirms that they are practical. To the best of our knowledge these are the first fault attacks against ChaCha and Salsa that do not require faults in the control flow (e.g. instruction skip).