FIVER – Robust Verification of Countermeasures against Fault Injections

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Abstract

Fault Injection Analysis is seen as a powerful attack against implementations of cryptographic algorithms. Over the last two decades, researchers proposed a plethora of countermeasures to secure such implementations. However, the design process and implementation are still error-prone, complex, and manual tasks which require long-standing experience in hardware design and physical security. Moreover, the validation of the claimed security is often only done by empirical testing in a very late stage of the design process. To prevent such empirical testing strategies, approaches based on formal verification are applied instead providing the designer early feedback.In this work, we present a fault verification framework to validate the security of countermeasures against fault-injection attacks designed for ICs. The verification framework works on netlist-level, parses the given digital circuit into a model based on Binary Decision Diagrams, and performs symbolic fault injections. This verification approach constitutes a novel strategy to evaluate protected hardware designs against fault injections offering new opportunities as performing full analyses under a given fault models.Eventually, we apply the proposed verification framework to real-world implementations of well-established countermeasures against fault-injection attacks. Here, we consider protected designs of the lightweight ciphers CRAFT and LED-64 as well as AES. Due to several optimization strategies, our tool is able to perform more than 90 million fault injections in a single-round CRAFT design and evaluate the security in under 50 min while the symbolic simulation approach considers all 2128 primary inputs.