Graduation Year

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Major Professor

Mehran Mozaffari Kermani, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Srinivas Katkoori, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Sriram Chellappan, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Nasir Ghani, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Reza Azarderakhsh, Ph.D.

Keywords

Differential fault analysis (DFA), Error detection, Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Lightweight cryptography (LWC), Side-channel attacks (SCAs)

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography plays a vital role in securing resource-constrained deeply-embedded systems such as implantable and wearable medical devices, smart fabrics, smart homes, radio frequency identification tags, sensor networks, and privacy-constrained usage models. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated a standardization process for lightweight cryptography, a relatively-long multi-year effort, which eventually concluded in February 2023. Side-channel attacks (SCAs) exploit the vulnerabilities of a system by observing and analyzing side-channel information leakages. Fault analysis attacks are a type of active SCAs, where an intelligent adversary injects bit/byte faults into the implementation of a cryptographic cipher to recover the secret key. This dissertation tackles active fault attacks by applying different error detection strategies as countermeasures to the crucial components of different state-of-the-art lightweight cryptosystems in their hardware applications. The case studies include lightweight cryptographic ciphers - QARMA, Welch-Gong ciphers WAGE and WG-29, and ASCON, the winner of the NIST standardization process for lightweight cryptography in February 2023. The proposed error detection schemes are designed to be architecture-oblivious as well as low-cost in hardware constructions of the ciphers listed above. The schemes are benchmarked on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware platform for error coverage and performance evaluation via implementation overheads. The results of the proposed works in this dissertation lead to more reliable lightweight cryptography, immune against fault analysis attacks.

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