Differential Fault Analysis on A.E.S.

O.  Vivolo; P.  Dusart; G.  Letourneux

Paper 2003/010

Differential Fault Analysis on A.E.S.

O. Vivolo

P. Dusart

G. Letourneux

Abstract

This paper investigates Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Following the Bellcore fault model [2], we assume the injection of a single-byte error during the final rounds of encryption. We show how such faults propagate through AES transformations and demonstrate that the last round key can be derived with only a small number of faulty ciphertexts. From this information, the original cipher key can be eﬀiciently reconstructed. Numerical simulations confirm the practicality of the attack, requiring fewer than ten faulty outputs to recover a complete subkey. Our results highlight the vulnerability of AES implementations in tamper-resistant devices, such as smart cards, when exposed to fault injections. These findings emphasize the importance of incorporating robust error-detection and fault-resilient countermeasures in secure hardware.

Note: Summary of modifications of this version • The abstract of the article has been enriched and refined for greater clarity, and typographical errors in the text have been corrected. • The attribution of authorship has been clarified and explicitly stated in the abstract in order to make their contributions transparent and consistent with good academic practice.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Secret-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Applied Cryptography and Network Security
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-45203-4_23
Keywords: Smartcards AES DFA Symmetric cryptography Side-channel attacks Hardware security Subkey recovery Fault injection
Contact author(s): olivier @ vivolo dev
History: 2025-08-19: last of 3 revisions; 2003-01-20: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2003/010
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2003/010,
      author = {O.  Vivolo and P.  Dusart and G.  Letourneux},
      title = {Differential Fault Analysis on A.E.S.},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2003/010},
      year = {2003},
      doi = {10.1007/978-3-540-45203-4_23},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/010}
}