Paper 2022/860

AB-SIFA: SIFA with Adjacent-Byte Model

Abstract

Statistical Ineffective Fault Attack (SIFA) has been a threat for implementa-tions of symmetric cryptographic primitives. Unlike Differential Fault At-tacks (DFA) which takes both correct and faulty ciphertexts, SIFA can re-cover the secret key with only correct ciphertexts. The classic SIFA is only effective on fault models with non-uniform distribution of intermediate val-ue. In this paper, we present a new fault model named adjacent-byte model, which describes a non-uniform distribution of relationship between two bytes (i.e. exclusive-or). To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that this fault model has been proposed. We also show that the adjacent-byte faults can be induced by different fault sources and easy to reproduce. Then a new SIFA attack method called AB-SIFA on symmetric cryptography is proposed. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new attack by simulating the attack. Finally, our attacks are applied to a software implementations of AES-128 with redundant countermeasure and a hardware AES co-processor, utilizing voltage glitches and clock glitches.