High performance and reliable fault detection scheme for the advanced encryption standard

Fault injection attacks are powerful cryptanalysis techniques against the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. These attacks are based on injecting faults into the structure of the AES to obtain confidential information. To protect the AES implementation against these attacks, a number of countermeasures have been proposed. In this paper, we proposed a fault detection scheme, based on the information redundancy, for the AES. We discuss the strengths and the weaknesses of this scheme against the fault attacks. Moreover, we conduct a comparative study between fault detection schemes from the literature in terms of fault detection capabilities and implementation cost. The simulation results show that the fault coverage achieves 99.998% for the proposed scheme. Moreover, the proposed detection scheme has been implemented on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. Its fault coverage, area overhead, throughput and frequency degradation have been compared and it is shown that the proposed scheme allows a trade-off between the hardware overhead and the security of the AES.