A DFA on AES Based on the Entropy of Error Distributions

Abstract

Differential fault analysis (DFA) techniques have been widely studied during the past decade. To our best knowledge, most DFA techniques on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) either impose strong constraints on the fault injection process or require numerous faults in order to recover the secret key. This article presents a simple methodology based on information theory which allows to adapt the number of required faults for the analysis to the fault injection process. With this technique, the constraints on the fault model to recover the last round key are considerably lowered. Additionally, entropy is proposed as a tool to apprehend the most complex fault models in DFA. A practical realization and simulations are presented to illustrate our methodology.