Recomputing with Permuted Operands: A Concurrent Error Detection Approach

Abstract

Naturally occurring and maliciously injected faults reduce the reliability of cryptographic hardware and may leak confidential information. We develop a concurrent error detection technique (CED) called recomputing with permuted operands (REPO). We show that it is cost effective in advanced encryption standard (AES) and a secure hash function Grøstl. We provide experimental results and formal proofs to show that REPO detects all single-bit and single-byte faults. Experimental results show that REPO achieves close to 100% fault coverage for multiple byte faults. The hardware and throughput overheads are compared with those of previously reported CED techniques on two Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The hardware overhead is 12.4%-27.3%, and the throughput is 1.2-23 Gbps, depending on the AES architecture, FPGA family, and detection latency. The performance overhead ranges from 10% to 100% depending on the security level. Moreover, the proposed technique can be integrated into various block cipher modes of operation. We also discuss the limitation of REPO and its potential vulnerabilities.