Information Theory-Based Quantitative Evaluation Method for Countermeasures Against Fault Injection Attacks

Abstract

The integrated circuits are faced with the threats of fault injection attacks (FIAs), which employ the faulty results and differential fault analysis to retrieve the vital information processed by the circuits. Countermeasures should be taken to protect the circuits against FIAs. This paper proposes a security evaluation method to quantitatively analyze the resistance of block ciphers with a Substitution-Permutation Network structure against FIAs from an information-theoretic perspective. A quantitative security factor is defined based on the amount of information leakage. Specifically, an extended cipher model is proposed to numerically analyze the theoretical amount of information leakage, and an efficient approach is proposed to obtain the actual amount of information leakage. Experiments by applying the quantitative evaluation method to AES circuit validate feasibility, efficiency and scalability of the method. The experimental results show that the security factor can quantify the effects of different fault models and countermeasures. 2000 fault injections are sufficient to complete the evaluation under the considered fault models within 10 microseconds. The proposed method can be used during the circuit design stage as well as chip testing stage.

Fault Injection Attack Emulation Framework for Early Evaluation of IC Designs

“…If the amount of actually leaked information is closer to the upper bound, the attack is more efficient; i.e., circuit designs' security is worse. The approach was extended in our early work [29] to calculate the amount of information leakage based on an extended cipher model.…”

“…These terms have some overlapping meanings, but also some different attributes. This article focuses on evaluating the confidentiality attribute for cipher circuit designs and the fault-tolerance attribute for the nonencryption circuit design, based on the information-theoretic-based approach [29]. The evaluation on the two specific attributes demonstrates the application of the proposed framework.…”

“…According to the information theory and the characteristics of the block ciphers, m is obtained in practice as below. The main derivation procedure is in [29].…”

Use Secret-Hashing Technology to Resist Side-Channel Attacks Based on Round-Keys

“…For instance, symmetric encryption within modern cryptography, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). A key of rounds can be easily obtained by the Correlation Power Attack (CPA) [9][10] [11] of physics leakage or the Fault Injection Attack (FIA) [12][13] [14]. Then all the round-keys can be recovered with the explicit mapping relationship of key expansion.…”