Paper 2026/2410

KIFA: Kernel-based Integral Fault Analysis on GIFT-Family Ciphers

Abstract

We present KIFA (Kernel-based Integral Fault Analysis), an integral fault attack framework that mines its balanced properties with the kernel-based miner of Hwang et al. in place of Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). The miner handles only small input structures fixed in advance, and a fault model provides exactly such structures. For DEFAULT, we present attacks at fault penetration (FP) $9$ under a random-position nibble fault and FP $10$ under a random-position byte fault, beyond the prior best integral fault attack at FP $8$. They leave a single master-key candidate under the simple key schedule and reduce the key space to $2^{64}$ under the rotating key schedule. For GIFT-128, we present the first integral fault attacks, at FP $7$ and $8$, against the prior best of $5$. For GIFT-64, we extend the prior best FP $6$ to $7$ with a byte fault, leaving $2^{32}$ master-key candidates. For BAKSHEESH, we extend the prior best FP $7$ to $8$, also when the fault position is uncontrolled.