Detecting faults in inner product masking scheme

Abstract

Side-channel analysis and fault injection attacks are two typical threats to cryptographic implementations, especially in modern embedded devices. Thus, there is an insistent demand for dual side-channel and fault injection protections. As we know, masking is a kind of provable countermeasure against side-channel attacks. Recently, inner product masking (IPM) was proposed as a promising higher-order masking scheme against side-channel analysis, but not for fault injection attacks. In this paper, we devise a new masking scheme named IPM-FD. It is built on IPM, which enables fault detection. This novel masking scheme has three properties: the security orders in the word-level probing model, bit-level probing model and the number of detected faults. IPM-FD is proven secure both in the word-level and in the bit-level probing models and allows for end-to-end fault detection against fault injection attacks. Furthermore, we illustrate its security order by interpreting IPM-FD as a coding problem and then linking it to one defining parameters of linear code and show its implementation cost by applying IPM-FD to AES-128.