One of the most effective ways of attacking a cryptographic device is by deliberate fault injection during computation, which allows retrieving the secret key with a small number of attempts. Several attacks on symmetric and public-key cryptosystems have been described in the literature and some dedicated error-detection techniques have been proposed to foil them. The proposed techniques are ad hoc ones and exploit specific properties of the cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a general framework for error detection in symmetric ciphers based on an operation-centered approach. We first enumerate the arithmetic and logic operations included in the cipher and analyze the efficacy and hardware complexity of several error-detecting codes for each such operation. We then recommend an error-detecting code for the cipher as a whole based on the operations it employs. We also deal with the trade-off between the frequency of checking for errors and the error coverage. We demonstrate our framework on a representative group of 11 symmetric ciphers. Our conclusions are supported by both analytical proofs and extensive simulation experiments.

An operation-centered approach to fault detection in symmetric cryptography ciphers

BREVEGLIERI, LUCA ODDONE;MAISTRI, PAOLO
2007-01-01

Abstract

One of the most effective ways of attacking a cryptographic device is by deliberate fault injection during computation, which allows retrieving the secret key with a small number of attempts. Several attacks on symmetric and public-key cryptosystems have been described in the literature and some dedicated error-detection techniques have been proposed to foil them. The proposed techniques are ad hoc ones and exploit specific properties of the cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a general framework for error detection in symmetric ciphers based on an operation-centered approach. We first enumerate the arithmetic and logic operations included in the cipher and analyze the efficacy and hardware complexity of several error-detecting codes for each such operation. We then recommend an error-detecting code for the cipher as a whole based on the operations it employs. We also deal with the trade-off between the frequency of checking for errors and the error coverage. We demonstrate our framework on a representative group of 11 symmetric ciphers. Our conclusions are supported by both analytical proofs and extensive simulation experiments.
2007
cryptography; error-detecting code; fault attacks; fault detection; symmetric cipher; parity code; residue code; countermeasure; differential fault analysis; DFA
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/552569
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