A side-channel and fault-attack resistant AES circuit working on duplicated complemented values

Abstract

Cryptographic circuits can be subjected to several kinds of side-channel and fault attacks in order to extract the secret key. Side-channel attacks can be carried by measuring either the power consumed or the EM waves emitted by the cryptographic module and trying to find a correlation between the given side-channel and the data manipulated. Concerning fault attacks, in the case of differential fault attacks (DFA), a cryptographic calculation is corrupted in such a way as to retrieve information about the secret key. Faults can be induced by different means such as lasers, voltage glitches, electromagnetic perturbations or clock skews. Several counter-measures, like in, have been separately proposed to tackle either kind of attack. In this paper, we describe the implementation of an AES chip where duplicated and complemented data paths provide resistance against both side-channel and fault attacks.