Validating the DFA Attack Resistance of AES (Short Paper)

Abstract

Physical attacks are a serious threat to the Internet of Things devices. Differential power analysis attacks are the most well-known physical attacks that exploit physical information leaked from hardware devices to retrieve secret information. Fault analysis attacks, a type of physical attack, are often considered more powerful than side-channel attacks if an attacker can inject the attacker’s intended faults. In fact, a few times of fault injections have enabled the attacker to retrieve the secret key. In this study, we propose a new model to validate the resistance of block ciphers to Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) attacks by assuming an ideal block cipher in which the differential probability is the same for all input and output differences. We show that Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is near ideal for DFA attack resistance according to the experimental results.