Research of Algebraic Fault Analysis on Piccolo
Zhao Xin · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2013
The security of Piccolo is evaluated under the algebraic fault analysis(AFA).Firstly,Piccolo is described as a set of algebraic equations.The faulty ciphertext is generated via fault injections and then the fault differences are also represented with algebraic equations even when the locations of the fault injections are unknown.Finally,the CryptoMinisat solver is applied to solve for the key.The simulation experiments demonstrate that: compared with the traditional differential fault analysis(DFA),the number of fault injections that required in AFA is smaller,only a single fault injection at the 23-rd round is enough to break Piccolo-80;the procedure of AFA is quite simple,in contrast to DFA,the adversaries do not need to judge the accurate fault locations and carry out the complicated manual analysis on the targeted algorithms and fault models;the utilization ratio of computing resources is high,since the key recovery in fault attacks can be converted into the problem of solving algebraic equations,the adversaries can fully utilize the computing resources;the technique of AFA is generic,the attack can be easily extended to wide fault models,deep fault model,other variants of Piccolo and other block ciphers.This paper shows that AFA is very promising to become a generic methodology to evaluate the security of block ciphers against fault attacks.