Error control scheme for malicious and natural faults in cryptographic modules

Abstract Today’s electronic systems must simultaneously fulfill strict requirements on security and reliability. In particular, their cryptographic modules are exposed to faults, which can be due to natural failures (e.g., radiation or electromagnetic noise) or malicious fault-injection attacks. We present an architecture based on a new class of error-detecting codes that combine robustness properties with a minimal distance. The new architecture guarantees (with some probability) the detection of faults injected by an intelligent and strategic adversary who can precisely control the disturbance. At the same time it supports automatic correction of low-multiplicity faults. To this end, we discuss an efficient technique to correct single nibble/byte errors while avoiding full syndrome analysis. We also examine a Compact Protection Code (CPC)-based system level fault manager that considers this code an inner code (and the CPC as its outer code). We report experimental results obtained by physical fault injection on the SAKURA-G FPGA board. The experimental results reconfirm the assumption that faults may cause an arbitrary number of bit flips. They indicate that a combined inner–outer coding scheme can significantly reduce the number of fault events that go undetected due to erroneous corrections of the inner code.