Abstract
Algebraic fault analysis (AFA), which combines algebraic cryptanalysis with fault attacks, has represented serious threats to the security of lightweight block ciphers. Inspired by an earlier framework for the analysis of side-channel attacks presented at EUROCRYPT 2009, a new generic framework is proposed to analyze and evaluate algebraic fault attacks on lightweight block ciphers. We interpret AFA at three levels: the target, the adversary, and the evaluator. We describe the capability of an adversary in four parts: the fault injector, the fault model describer, the cipher describer, and the machine solver. A formal fault model is provided to cover most of the current fault attacks. Different strategies of building optimal equation set are also provided to accelerate the solving process. At the evaluator level, we consider the approximate information metric and the actual security metric. These metrics can be used to guide adversaries, cipher designers, and industrial engineers. To verify the feasibility of the proposed framework, we make a comprehensive study of AFA on an ultra-lightweight block cipher called LBlock. Three scenarios are exploited which include injecting a fault to encryption, to key scheduling, or modifying the round number or counter. Our best results show that a single fault injection is enough to recover the master key of LBlock within the affordable complexity in each scenario.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the grants 61472357 and 61571063, the Zhejiang University Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under the grant 2018QNA5005, the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Cryptology under the grand MMKFKT201805, the Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies, the Major Scientific Research Project of Zhejiang Lab under the grant 2018FD0ZX01, and the European Commission through the ERC project 280141 (acronym CRASH).
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Zhang, F. et al. (2019). An Automated Framework for Analysis and Evaluation of Algebraic Fault Attacks on Lightweight Block Ciphers. In: Breier, J., Hou, X., Bhasin, S. (eds) Automated Methods in Cryptographic Fault Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11333-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11333-9_5
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