Paper 2010/440

Piret and Quisquater's DFA on AES Revisited

Christophe Giraud and Adrian Thillard

Abstract

At CHES 2003, Piret and Quisquater published a very efficient DFA on AES which has served as a basis for many variants published afterwards. In this paper, we revisit P&Q's DFA on AES and we explain how this attack can be much more efficient than originally claimed. In particular, we show that only 2 (resp. 3) faulty ciphertexts allow an attacker to efficiently recover the key in the case of AES-192 (resp. AES-256). Our attack on AES-256 is the most efficient attack on this key length published so far.

Note: Small update to emphasize the contribution of this paper.