Paper 2009/585

An Improved Differential Fault Attack on Camellia

ZHAO Xin-jie and WANG Tao

Abstract

The S-box lookup is one of the most important operations in cipher algorithm design, and also is the most effective part to prevent traditional linear and differential attacks, however, when the physical implementation of the algorithm is considered, it becomes the weakest part of cryptosystems. This paper studies an active fault based implementation attack on block ciphers with S-box. Firstly, it proposes the basic DFA model and then presents two DFA models for Feistel and SPN structure block ciphers. Secondly, based on the Feistel DFA model, it presents several improved attacks on Camellia encryption and proposes new attacks on Camellia key schedule. By injecting one byte random fault into the r-1th round left register or the the r-1th round key, after solving 8 equations to recover 5 or 6 propagated differential fault of the rth round left register, 5 or 6 bytes of the rth equivalent subkey can be recovered at one time. Simulation experiments demonstrate that about 16 faulty ciphertexts are enough to obtain Camellia-128 key, and about 32, 24 ciphertexts are required to obtain both Camellia-192/256 key with and without FL/FL-1 layer respectively. Compared with the previous study by ZHOU Yongbin et. al. by injecting one byte fault into the rth round left register to recover 1 equivalent subkey byte and obtaining Camellia-128 and Camellia-192/256 with 64 and 96 faulty ciphertexts respectively, our attacks not only extend the fault location, but also improve the fault injection efficiency and decrease the faulty ciphertexts number, besides, our DFA model on Camellia encryption can be easily extended to DFA on Camellia key schedule case, while ZHOU’s can not. The attack model proposed in this paper can be adapted into most of the block ciphers with S-boxes. Finally, the contradictions between traditional cryptography and implementation attacks are analyzed, the state of the art and future directions of the DFA on Block ciphers with S-boxes are discussed.