Design-for-Error-Detection in Implementations of Cryptographic Nonlinear Substitution Boxes Benchmarked on ASIC
Anita Aghaie, Mehran Mozaffari Kermani, Reza Azarderakhsh · 2018
Achieving different security properties through lightweight cryptography has been the focus of recent research efforts. A wide range of criteria should be taken into account when designing lightweight ciphers, such as both the linear and non-linear properties, and resilience to active side-channel attacks (SCA), e.g., fault analysis attacks mounted on VLSI implementations. This paper motivates the urgency and highlights the importance of considering reliability and error detection as a design factor beforehand rather than an afterthought. In this paper and through case studies, we motivate the urgency of “design-for low-cost reliability and fault diagnosis” for future work to thwart fault analysis attacks “before” the algorithms are designed. In this paper, we focus on the design criteria of S-boxes transformations (we note that for different ciphers, these transformations might be denoted by other yet similar terms), which provide diffusion and confusion properties in block ciphers, stream ciphers, and hash functions. We also present the results of our implementations for a set of S-boxes used in various block ciphers benchmarked on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The proposed assessments for reliability and error detection of lightweight ciphers is a step forward towards design for error detection while achieving secure implementations.