Stealthy Hardware Trojan Based Algebraic Fault Analysis of HIGHT Block Cipher

Hao Chen,Wei He,Xinjie Zhao,Lumin Xu,Yunfei Ma,Tao Wang,Fan Zhang

doi:10.1155/2017/8051728

Abstract

HIGHT is a lightweight block cipher which has been adopted as a standard block cipher. In this paper, we present a bit-level algebraic fault analysis (AFA) of HIGHT, where the faults are perturbed by a stealthy HT. The fault model in our attack assumes that the adversary is able to insert a HT that flips a specific bit of a certain intermediate word of the cipher once the HT is activated. The HT is realized by merely 4 registers and with an extremely low activation rate of about 0.000025. We show that the optimal location for inserting the designed HT can be efficiently determined by AFA in advance. Finally, a method is proposed to represent the cipher and the injected faults with a merged set of algebraic equations and the master key can be recovered by solving the merged equation system with an SAT solver. Our attack, which fully recovers the secret master key of the cipher in 12572.26 seconds, requires three times of activation on the designed HT. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Trojan attack on HIGHT.

Highlights

The resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags and smart cards have been pervasively used in the daily activities of human society, such as intelligent transportation, modern logistics, and food safety [1, 2]
We show that the lightweight block cipher HIGHT is prone to algebraic fault analysis, which can be feasible with a stealthy hardware Trojan (HT)
Since the key schedule of HIGHT is very simple, we mainly focus on the encryption of HIGHT which is shown in Algorithm 1

Summary

Introduction

The resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags and smart cards have been pervasively used in the daily activities of human society, such as intelligent transportation, modern logistics, and food safety [1, 2]. Hardware Trojan is a circuit maliciously inserted into integrated circuit (IC) that typically functions to deactivate the host circuit, change its functionality, or provide covert channels through which sensitive information can be leaked [10, 11]. They can be implemented as hardware modifications to ASICs, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts, microprocessors, microcontrollers, network processors, or digitalsignal processors (DSPs) and can be implemented as firmware modifications to, for example, FPGA bitstreams [12]. Due to outsourcing trend of the semiconductor design and fabrication, hardware Trojan attacks have emerged as a major security concern for integrated circuits (ICs) [13]

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