Toward Effective Countermeasures against an Improved Fault Sensitivity Analysis

This paper proposes the countermeasures against an improved fault sensitivity analysis. Our countermeasure is proposed based on the WDDL technique due to its built-in resistance against both the power-based attack and differential fault analysis. At CHES 2010, Li et al. proposed the FSA attack on WDDL-AES. The vulnerability of WDDL-AES in their attack mainly comes from the implementation deficiency rather than the WDDL technique itself. This paper first proposes an improved fault sensitive analysis that can threat a well-implemented WDDL-AES based on the input-data dependency for the critical path delay of WDDL S-box. Then we discuss the possibility of efficient countermeasures by modifying the WDDL circuit with a limited overhead. The countermeasures are discussed based on either modifying the dual-rail to single-rail converter or the introduction of the enable signal.