A parity code based fault detection for an implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard

Abstract

Concurrent fault detection for a hardware implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is important not only to protect the encryption/decryption process from random faults. It will also protect the encryption/decryption circuitry from an attacker who may maliciously inject faults in order to find the encryption secret key. In this paper we present a novel fault detection scheme which is based on a multiple parity bit code and show that the proposed scheme leads to very efficient and high coverage fault detection. We then estimate the associated hardware costs and detection latencies.