Countermeasures against fault attacks: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Hardware implementations of cryptographic systems are becoming common, due to new market needs and to reduced costs. However, the security of a system may be seriously compromised by implementation attacks, such as side channel analysis or fault analysis. Thus, a large number of solutions have been proposed to counteract these threats. In this paper, we present most common architectural countermeasures against natural or malicious fault injections, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and giving a few nontrivial considerations.