ROCKY: Rotation Countermeasure for the Protection of Keys and Other Sensitive Data

Abstract

Fault attacks exploit the possibility to inject a fault in an electronic device, during the execution of a cryptographic algorithm, leading the device to erroneous operation(s). An adversary can exploit these errors and extract valuable information, making the development of countermeasures against fault attacks necessary. In this work, we present a novel countermeasure that applies to cryptographic primitives that make use of a permutation with almost shift-invariant round functions. Our countermeasure offers protection against fault attacks that rely on the injection of a fault in multiple executions of the same algorithm. In order to demonstrate the hardware overhead of the proposed countermeasure, we implement an FPGA-oriented protected version of Xoodyak, an authenticated encryption lightweight scheme in the NIST lightweight cryptography standardization competition.