Detection and Correction of Malicious and Natural Faults in Cryptographic Modules

Abstract

Today’s electronic systems must simultaneously fulfill strict requirements on security and reliability. In particular, their cryptographic modules are exposed to faults, which can be due to natural failures (e.g., radiation or electromagnetic noise) or malicious faultinjection attacks. We present an architecture based on a new class of error-detecting codes that combine robustness properties with a minimal distance. The new architecture guarantees (with some probability) the detection of faults injected by an intelligent and strategic adversary who can precisely control the disturbance. At the same time it supports automatic correction of low-multiplicity faults. To this end, we discuss an efficient technique to correct single errors while avoiding full syndrome analysis. We report experimental results obtained by physical fault injection on the SAKURA-G FPGA board.