A differential fault attack against early rounds of (Triple-)DES

Abstract

Previously proposed differential fault analysis (DFA) techniques against iterated block ciphers mostly exploit computational errors in the last few rounds of the cipher to extract the secret key. In this paper we describe a DFA attack that exploits computational errors in early rounds of a Feistel cipher. The principle of the attack is to force collisions by inducing faults in intermediate results of the cipher. We put this attack into practice against DES implemented on a smart card and extracted the full round key of the first round within a few hours by inducing one bit errors in the second and third round, respectively. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2004.