Abstract:

Fault injection attack is an effective cryptanalysis method.However,most existing fault injection attacks have strict restrictions on the location,time and number of faults injected,require complicated mathematical derivation during the key recovery process or need a huge amount of time to train fault attack templates.This paper proposes a comprehensive correlation fault injection attack on AES implementations of different key lengths,leveraging the correlation in the fault effect propagation in AES to recover the key.Our attack method uses a more flexible fault model in terms of the location and number of fault injections while only requiring simple correlation analysis to recover the key.Experimental results using AES implementations of variable key sizes show that random faults injected at any position before the mix-columns operation in the-2 round will allow successful recovery of the last round key through correlation analysis of the fault effects at the inputs of the S-Box in the final round.Additional random faults injected at any position before the mix-columns operation in the-3 round will allow the recovery of the round key before the final round.The key search complexity of the proposed method is 2¹⁶.Two correct and faulty ciphertext pairs or four faulty ciphertexts under the same plaintext are sufficient to recover the original key of AES-128 and four correct and faulty ciphertext pairs or eight faulty ciphertexts under the same plaintext are sufficient to recover the original key of AES-192 and AES-256.

Key words: side channel analysis, fault injection attack, correlation fault analysis, advanced encryption standard