Towards Lightweight Error Detection Schemes for Implementations of MixColumns in Lightweight Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper proposes lightweight error detection and reliability schemes for MixColumns in lightweight cryptography, emphasizing the use of MDS matrices, recomputation, and fault space transformation to enhance security and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive approach combining linear codes, recomputation, and fault space transformation for error detection in lightweight cryptographic implementations.

Findings

Verified MixColumn/MixNibble transformations with MDS matrices

Proposed fault detection methods suitable for lightweight cryptography

Benchmark results on ASIC implementations

Abstract

In this paper, through considering lightweight cryptography, we present a comparative realization of MDS matrices used in the VLSI implementations of lightweight cryptography. We verify the MixColumn/MixNibble transformation using MDS matrices and propose reliability approaches for thwarting natural and malicious faults. We note that one other contribution of this work is to consider not only linear error detecting codes but also recomputation mechanisms as well as fault space transformation (FST) adoption for lightweight cryptographic algorithms. Our intention in this paper is to propose reliability and error detection mechanisms (through linear codes, recomputations, and FST adopted for lightweight cryptography) to consider the error detection schemes in designing beforehand taking into account such algorithmic security. We also posit that the MDS matrices applied in the MixColumn (or MixNibble) transformation of ciphers to protect ciphers against linear and differential attacks should be incorporated in the cipher design in order to reduce the overhead of the applied error detection schemes. Finally, we present a comparative implementation framework on ASIC to benchmark the VLSI hardware implementation presented in this paper.