Inapplicability of Differential Fault Attacks Against Cellular Automata Based Lightweight Authenticated Cipher

Authenticated encryption (AE) schemes are a necessity to secure the physical devices connected to the Internet. Two AE schemes, Tiny-Jambu and Elephant, are finalists of NIST lightweight cryptography competition. Another AE scheme, ACORN v3, a CAESAR compe-tition finalist, has been shown to be particularly vulnerable against Differential Fault Attack (DFA), even more than its previous version ACORN v2. TinyJambu is also susceptible to DFA. An optimized inter-polation attack has been proposed against one instance of Elephant, Delirium, recently. We propose methods to strengthen these schemes using the Cellular Automata (CA) and increase their resistance to these attacks. The Programmable Cellular Automata (PCA) 90-150 is effec-tively deployed to make these ciphers robust against DFA. We also pro-vide mathematical analysis of the invigorated schemes and show that significant improvement is achieved in all the three enhanced schemes.