SAFARI: Automatic Synthesis of Fault-Attack Resistant Block Cipher Implementations

Abstract

Most cipher implementations are vulnerable to a class of cryptanalytic attacks known as fault injection attacks. To reveal the secret key, these attacks make use of faults induced at specific locations during the execution of the cipher. Countermeasures for fault injection attacks require these vulnerable locations in the implementation to be first identified and then protected. However, both these steps are difficult and error-prone and, hence, it requires considerable expertise to design efficient countermeasures. Incorrect or insufficient application of the countermeasures would cause the implementation to remain vulnerable, while inefficient application of the countermeasures could lead to significant performance penalties to achieve the desired fault-attack resistance. In this paper, we present a novel framework called SAFARI for automatically synthesizing fault-attack resistant implementations of block ciphers. The framework takes as input the security requirements and a high-level specification of the block cipher. It automatically detects the vulnerable locations from the specification, applies an appropriate countermeasure based on the user-specified security requirements, and then synthesizes an efficient, fault-attack protected, RTL, or C code for the cipher. We take AES, CAMELLIA, and CLEFIA as case studies and demonstrate how the framework would explore different countermeasures, based on the vulnerability of the locations, the output format, and the required security margins. We then evaluate the efficacy of SAFARI in hardware and software to the design overhead incurred and the fault coverage.