Research on a Random Mask Infection Countermeasure against Double Fault Attacks

Abstract

The infection countermeasure, in which the main idea is to prevent adversaries from exploiting faulty ciphertexts to break the key by spreading the induced fault, is a very effective countermeasure against fault attacks. However, most existing infection countermeasures struggle to defend against double-fault attacks effectively due to the single-fault assumption. By analyzing the principle of infection mechanism and adding different random Boolean masks in the two encryption paths, this paper proposes a measure called a random mask infection countermeasure to defend against double-fault attacks. In addition, the multiplication mask is used to randomize the fault diffusion to further resist single-byte fault attacks. The experimental results indicate that the random mask infection countermeasure proposed can perform fault diffusion effectively when the cryptographic circuit suffers double-fault attacks, and the fault diffusion shows randomness, and can effectively defend against these fault attacks.

Keywords

• AES
• infection countermeasure
• mask
• fault attacks