Thwarting Fault Attacks against Lightweight Cryptography using SIMD Instructions

Abstract

A growing number of connected objects, with their high performance and low-resources constraints, are embedding lightweight ciphers for protecting the confidentiality of the data they manipulate or store. Since those objects are easily accessible, they are prone to a whole range of physical attacks, one of which are fault attacks against which countermeasures are usually expensive to implement, especially on off-the-shelf devices. For such devices, we propose a new generic software countermeasure, using SIMD instructions available in almost any off-the-shelf devices, to thwart most fault attacks while preserving the performances of the targeted cipher.