A cryptography core tolerant to DFA fault attacks

ABSTRACT

This work describes a hardware approach for the concurrent fault detection and error correction in a cryptography core. It has been shown in the literature that transient faults injected in a cryptography core can lead to reveal the encryption code using quite inexpensive equipments. This kind of attack is a real threat to tamper resistant devices such as Smart Cards. To tackle such attacks, the cryptography core must be immune to transient faults. In this work the DES algorithm is taken as a vulnerable cryptosystem case study. We show how an attack against DES is performed through a fault injection campaign. Then, a countermeasure based on partial hardware replication is proposed and applied to DES. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed scheme to protect DES against DFA fault attacks. Furthermore, the proposed solution is independent of implementation and can be applied to other cryptography algorithms, such as AES.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.8 Performance and Reliability
      B.8.0 General

General Terms:
Reliability, Security

Keywords:
cryptography, fault attacks, smart cards