Power-based Side Channel Analysis and Fault Injection: Hacking Techniques and Combined Countermeasure

Abstract

Over the last years, physical attacks have been massively researched due to their capability to extract secret information from cryptographic engine. These hacking techniques are based on exploiting information from physical implementations instead of cryptographic algorithm flaws. Faultinjection attacks (FA) and Side-channel analysis (SCA) are the most popular techniques of implementation attacks. Aiming to secure cryptographic devices against such attacks, many studies have proposed a variety of developed and sophisticated countermeasures. Hence, the majority of these secured approaches are used for precise and single attack and it is difficult to thwart hybrid attack, such as combined power and fault attacks. In this work, the Advanced Encryption Standard is used as a case study in order to analyse the most well-known physical-based Hacking techniques: Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) and Correlation Power Analysis (CPA). Consequently, with the knowledge of such contemporary hacking technique, we proposed a low overhead countermeasure for the AES implementation that combines the concept of correlated power noise generating with a combined-approach based fault detection scheme. Keywords—Advanced encryption standard; fault attack; power attacks; combined countermeasure; hardware implementation