Design and Evaluation of Combined Hardware FIA and SCA Countermeasures for AES Cipher
Francisco Eugenio Potestad Ordóñez, Erica Tena‐Sánchez, Virginia Zuniga-Gonzalez, Antonio J. Acosta · 2024
The development of hardware countermeasures against hardware attacks has attracted the attention of the scientific community over the past two decades. Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) and Fault Injection Attacks (FIA) represent a significant risk to the security of cryptographic circuits. Combined countermeasures against these types of attack must be carefully designed if both protections are required in the same implementation without interfering with the other. In this paper, a combined proposal is presented to counteract the SCA and FIA attacks. SCA countermeasures are based on a low-entropy masking scheme, while the FIA countermeasure is based on a signature generator detection scheme. Both have been experimentally implemented in an AES cipher in FPGA. Experimental FIA attacks, first-order Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) attacks, and Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) tests have been carried out to evaluate the improvement in the security levels. The experimental results show that for an increase in area 28.77% and a frequency degradation of 4.05% with respect to the unprotected implementation, the protected Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) scheme shows great security metrics against FIA (99.87% fault coverage) and SCA attacks.