Generalized Code-Abiding Countermeasure

Abstract

The widely used countermeasures against fault attacks are based on spatial, temporal, or information redundancy. This type of solution is very efficient, but it can be very expensive in terms of implementation cost. Thus, trying to propose a secure and efficient countermeasure for a lightweight cipher is a hard challenge, as the goal of a lightweight cipher is to be the lightest possible. This paper considers information redundancy based on parity bit code, with code-abiding transformations of the operations. This error detection code, with the code-abiding notion added, is very efficient against single fault injection and has a small overcost. The solution is tested on the LED lightweight cipher to measure its overhead. Moreover, a bitslice version of the cipher is used with the parity bit code applied to be robust against all the single-word fault injections. The challenge is to adapt the cipher functions in a way in which the parity bit is always considered, but without considering a heavy implementation. The advantage of our solution is that this countermeasure leads to a 100% fault coverage, with a reasonable overhead.