ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shall see to what extent physical attacks have been successful so far in attacking implementations of pairing calculations. Both side-channel and fault attacks are covered. The authors also look at the countermeasures that have to be added to pairing calculations to increase their robustness against such attacks. The security of modern cryptography is based on the impossibility of breaking the implemented algorithms in practice. In order to reach such a goal, the algorithms are built in such a way that breaking them in theory is as expensive as doing an exhaustive search on the whole key. The cryptosystems are made public to ensure a high knowledge of potential attacks and the key length is selected according to the existing computation power available to prevent any brute force of the key. The strength of a given algorithm grows exponentially with the length of the key used.
