Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/032

An Information Theoretic Perspective on the Differential Fault Analysis against AES

Yang Li and Shigeto Gomisawa and Kazuo Sakiyama and Kazuo Ohta

Abstract: Differential Fault Analysis against AES has been actively studied these years. Based on similar assumptions of the fault injection, different DFA attacks against AES have been proposed. However, it is difficult to understand how different attack results are obtained for the same fault injection. It is also difficult to understand the relationship between similar assumptions of fault injection and the corresponding attack results. This paper reviews the previous DFA attacks against AES based on the information theory, and gives a general and easy understanding of DFA attacks against AES. We managed to apply the analysis on DFA attacks on AES-192 and AES-256, and we propose the attack procedures to reach the theoretically minimal number of fault injections.

Category / Keywords: Differential Fault Analysis, AES, Information theory

Date: received 20 Jan 2010, last revised 22 Jul 2010

Contact author: liyang at ice uec ac jp

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20100723:013358 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2010/032