Improved Side-Channel Resistance by Dynamic Fault-Injection Countermeasures

Abstract

Side-channel analysis and fault-injection attacks are known as serious threats to cryptographic hardware implementations and the combined protection against both is currently an open line of research. A promising countermeasure with considerable implementation overhead appears to be a mix of first-order secure Threshold Implementations and linear Error-Correcting Codes.In this paper we employ for the first time the inherent structure of non-systematic codes as fault countermeasure which dynamically mutates the applied generator matrices to achieve a higher-order side-channel and fault-protected design. As a case study, we apply our scheme to the PRESENT block cipher that do not show any higher-order side-channel leakage after measuring 150 million power traces.