Paper 2025/1692

Combined Stability: Protecting against Combined Attacks

Abstract

Physical attacks pose serious challenges to the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms. While side-channel analysis (SCA) has received significant attention, leading to well-established countermeasures, fault attacks and especially their combination with SCA (i.e., combined attacks) remain less researched. Addressing such combined attacks often requires a careful integration of masking and redundancy techniques to resist the reciprocal effects of faults and probes. Recent research on combined security has gained momentum, with most approaches relying on composable security notions involving error correction, typically applied after each nonlinear operation. While effective, this approach introduces an area and performance overhead, along with additional security challenges posed by the correction circuits themselves. In this work, we take a different direction, following the concept of stability introduced in StaTI (CHES 2024), which ensures fault propagation to protect against ineffective faults. We extend this concept to combined security by proposing a new composable security notion, combined stability, which integrates an extended stability notion, diffused stability, with arbitrarily composable glitch-extended probing security notions. Notably, this framework requires only a single error detection at the end of the computation, avoiding costly intermediate error checks and corrections. To demonstrate practicality, we describe a combined secure AES S-box hardware implementation. Our results show that this approach, achieving combined security with competitive implementation costs, offers a promising alternative to error-correction-based schemes.