Can Algorithm Diversity in Stream Cipher Implementation Thwart (Natural and) Malicious Faults?

Guo Xiaofei , Jin Chenglu , Athanasios Papadimitriou (1) , David Hely (2) , Ramesh Karri

1 LCIS - Laboratoire de Conception et d'Intégration des Systèmes
2 CTSYS - Conception et Test de SYStèmes embarqués

Hardware implementations of stream and other ciphers are vulnerable to natural faults. Moreover, attackers can launch fault attacks on these implementations. Concurrent error detection (CED) is used as a countermeasure against natural and malicious faults. We propose algorithm diversity (AD) to detect natural and malicious faults in stream ciphers. We compare AD to hardware, time, and information redundancies. Hardware redundancy has 100% hardware overhead, but is not secure against fault attacks. Time redundancy has lower hardware overhead, but is vulnerable to faults that are injected in both the computation and recomputation. Information redundancy techniques such as parity cannot detect an even number of faulty bits. Information redundancy techniques such as robust code has higher fault miss rate (FMR) with higher hardware overhead. If robust code is configured to have lower FMR than AD in certain attacker model, the hardware overhead is excessively high.

Mots clés: fault attack; stream cipher

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Guo Xiaofei, Jin Chenglu, Athanasios Papadimitriou, David Hely, Ramesh Karri. Can Algorithm Diversity in Stream Cipher Implementation Thwart (Natural and) Malicious Faults?. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2015, ⟨10.1109/TETC.2015.2434103⟩. ⟨hal-01205402⟩