A fault-tolerant pipelined architecture for symmetric block ciphers

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most popular symmetric encryption method, which encrypts streams of data by using symmetric keys. The current preferable AES architectures employ effective methods to achieve two important goals: protection against power analysis attacks and high-throughput. Based on a different architectural point of view, we implement a particular parallel architecture for the latter goal, which is capable of implementing a more efficient pipelining in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In this regard, all intermediate registers which have a role for unrolling the main loop will be removed. Also, instead of unrolling the main loop of AES algorithm, we implement pipelining structure by replicating nonpipelined AES architectures and using an auto-assigner mechanism for each AES block. By implementing the new pipelined architecture, we achieve two valuable advantages: (a) solving single point of failure problem when one of the replicated parts is faulty and (b) deploying the proposed design as a fault tolerant AES architecture. In addition, we put emphasis on area optimization for all four AES main functions to reduce the overhead associated with AES block replication. The simulation results show that the maximum frequency of our proposed AES architecture is 675.62[Formula: see text]MHz, and for AES128 the throughput is 86.5[Formula: see text]Gbps which is 30.9% better than its closest existing competitor.

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Evaluation of Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Symmetric Block Ciphers

2009 2nd International Conference on Computer Science and its Applications ◽

10.1109/csa.2009.5404195 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Muhammad Junaid ◽

Mukhtar Hussain ◽

Ashraf Masood ◽

Firdous Kausar ◽

Ayesha Noreen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Comparative Analysis ◽

Block Ciphers ◽

Symmetric Block

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On the semantic security of cellular automata based pseudo-random permutation using results from the Luby-Rackoff construction

Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska sectio AI – Informatica ◽

10.17951/ai.2015.15.1.21-31 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 21

Author(s):

Kamel Mohammed Faraoun

Keyword(s):

Cellular Automata ◽

Block Cipher ◽

Random Permutation ◽

Block Ciphers ◽

Random Permutations ◽

Semantic Security ◽

Transition Rules ◽

Reversible Cellular Automata ◽

Symmetric Block ◽

Number Of Iterations

This paper proposes a semantically secure construction of pseudo-random permutations using second-order reversible cellular automata. We show that the proposed construction is equivalent to the Luby-Rackoff model if it is built using non-uniform transition rules, and we prove that the construction is strongly secure if an adequate number of iterations is performed. Moreover, a corresponding symmetric block cipher is constructed and analysed experimentally in comparison with popular ciphers. Obtained results approve robustness and efficacy of the construction, while achieved performances overcome those of some existing block ciphers.

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Fully Automated Differential Fault Analysis on Software Implementations of Block Ciphers

IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems ◽

10.46586/tches.v2019.i3.1-29 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-29 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Xiaolu Hou ◽

Jakub Breier ◽

Fuyuan Zhang ◽

Yang Liu

Keyword(s):

Block Ciphers ◽

Fault Analysis ◽

Smt Solver ◽

Multiplication Operation ◽

Analysis Methodology ◽

Differential Fault Analysis ◽

Software Implementations ◽

Symmetric Block ◽

Assembly Analysis ◽

Effective Description

Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is considered as the most popular fault analysis method. While there are techniques that provide a fault analysis automation on the cipher level to some degree, it can be shown that when it comes to software implementations, there are new vulnerabilities, which cannot be found by observing the cipher design specification.This work bridges the gap by providing a fully automated way to carry out DFA on assembly implementations of symmetric block ciphers. We use a customized data flow graph to represent the program and develop a novel fault analysis methodology to capture the program behavior under faults. We establish an effective description of DFA as constraints that are passed to an SMT solver. We create a tool that takes assembly code as input, analyzes the dependencies among instructions, automatically attacks vulnerable instructions using SMT solver and outputs the attack details that recover the last round key (and possibly the earlier keys). We support our design with evaluations on lightweight ciphers SIMON, SPECK, and PRIDE, and a current NIST standard, AES. By automated assembly analysis, we were able to find new efficient DFA attacks on SPECK and PRIDE, exploiting implementation specific vulnerabilities, and previously published DFA on SIMON and AES. Moreover, we present a novel DFA on multiplication operation that has never been shown for symmetric block ciphers before. Our experimental evaluation also shows reasonable execution times that are scalable to current cipher designs and can easily outclass the manual analysis. Moreover, we present a method to check the countermeasure-protected implementations in a way that helps implementers to decide how many rounds should be protected. We note that this is the first work that automatically carries out DFA on cipher implementations without any plaintext or ciphertext information and therefore, can be generally applied to any input data to the cipher.

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