Homological Fault Attack on AES Block Cipher and Its Countermeasures

As the physical security of hardware systems becomes more and more serious, a large number of physical attacks and countermeasures against on-chip cryptographic algorithms are proposed. Clock glitch injection is an easy-to-implement and effective fault type. This paper presents a novel clock glitch-based fault attack on hardware-implemented encryption algorithm called homological fault attack (HFA). It allows us to attack with coarse-grained clock glitches and can extract the key only by the plaintext and whether the encryption result is correct. At the same time, this paper carries out HFA experiment on AES-128 encryption algorithm implemented on FPGA in the real physical environment. Experimental results show that HFA can be used for serial and parallel implementation of AES hardware implementation. And this method can be easily extended to attack other block encryption algorithms.