Paper 2019/515

A Countermeasure Against Statistical Ineffective Fault Analysis

Jakub Breier and Mustafa Khairallah and Xiaolu Hou and Yang Liu

Abstract

Current state-of-the-art countermeasures against Fault Injection Attacks (FIA) provide good protection against analysis methods that require the faulty ciphertext to derive the secret information, such as Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) or collision fault analysis. However, recent progress in Ineffective Fault Analysis (IFA) and Statistical IFA (SIFA) constitutes a real threat against cryptographic implementations and moreover, it cannot be thwarted by standard FIA countermeasures that focus on detecting the change in the intermediate data. In this paper, we present a novel method based on error correcting codes that protects implementations against SIFA. We design a set of universal error-correcting gates that can be used for implementing block ciphers. We analyze a hardware implementation of protected GIFT-64 and show that our method provides 100% protection against SIFA.