¹School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University
²Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

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Abstract—The Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) is a main type of structure in block ciphers. This paper proposes a new and practical differential fault attack technique on SPN structure. As an instance of SPN cipher, AES-256 can be recovered by 4 faulty ciphertexts. Compared with the previous techniques, our work can recover all subkeys of an SPN cipher with all key sizes. Therefore, our attacking method on AES not only improves the efficiency of fault injection, but also decreases the number of faulty ciphertexts. It provides a new approach for fault analysis on block ciphers.

Index Terms—Cryptanalysis, Side channel attacks, Differential fault analysis, SPN, AES

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Cite: Wei Li, Xiaoling Xia, Dawu Gu, Zhiqiang Liu, Juanru Li, Ya Liu, "A New Differential Fault Attack on SPN Structure, with Application to AES Cipher," Journal of Computers vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 216-223, 2011.