Differential fault analysis for round-reduced AES by fault injection

Abstract

This paper presents a practical differential fault analysis method for the faulty Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a reduced round by means of a semi-invasive fault injection. To verify our proposal, we implement the AES software on the ATmega128 microcontroller as recommended in the standard document FIPS 197. We reduce the number of rounds using a laser beam injection in the experiment. To deduce the initial round key, we perform an exhaustive search for possible key bytes associated with faulty ciphertexts. Based on the simulation result, our proposal extracts the AES 128-bit secret key in less than 10 hours with 10 pairs of plaintext and faulty ciphertext. © 2011 ETRI.