CRAFT: Lightweight Tweakable Block Cipher with Efficient Protection Against DFA Attacks

• Published in: IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology Vol. 2019; no. 1
• Main Authors: Christof Beierle, Gregor Leander, Amir Moradi, Shahram Rasoolzadeh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ruhr-Universität Bochum 19.03.2019
• Subjects: block cipher; CRAFT; fault detection; involutory; lightweight; tweakable
• DOI: 10.13154/tosc.v2019.i1.5-45

Traditionally, countermeasures against physical attacks are integrated into the implementation of cryptographic primitives after the algorithms have been designed for achieving a certain level of cryptanalytic security. This picture has been changed by the introduction of PICARO, ZORRO, and FIDES, where efficient protection against Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks has been considered in their design. In this work we present the tweakable block cipher CRAFT: the efficient protection of its implementations against Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) attacks has been one of the main design criteria, while we provide strong bounds for its security in the related-tweak model. Considering the area footprint of round-based hardware implementations, CRAFT outperforms the other lightweight ciphers with the same state and key size. This holds not only for unprotected implementations but also when fault-detection facilities, side-channel protection, and their combination are integrated into the implementation. In addition to supporting a 64-bit tweak, CRAFT has the additional property that the circuit realizing the encryption can support the decryption functionality as well with very little area overhead.