Fault Injection Attacks Against zkSTARKs

Fault injection attacks targeting schemes with zero-knowledge (ZK) properties are relatively absent in the wider literature. One of the few examples has recently shown a ZK signature scheme to be vulnerable to fault injection attacks. In this paper, we detail candidate fault injection attacks against zero-knowledge scalable transparent argument of knowledge (zkSTARK) provers, designed to violate zero knowledge capabilities. zkSTARK proving systems are complex, with a huge amount of diversity in implementation specifics. We match the variety within the STARK implementation ecosystem, proposing a variety of fault injection attacks against different popular algorithmic primitives. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first exploration of the fault injection surface of zkSTARKs, and of the wider class of general-purpose ZK proving systems.