Pushing the Limit of PFA: Enhanced Persistent Fault Analysis on Block Ciphers

Persistent fault analysis (PFA) is a newly proposed cryptanalysis for block ciphers. Although the injected fault is persistent during the entire encryption, the corresponding analysis is only applied to the last round in the original PFA. In this article, the enhanced PFA (EPFA) is proposed, which can push the limit of PFA by exploiting the fault leakage in deeper rounds and target to reduce the number of required ciphertexts as small as possible. EPFA is first introduced as a general method with a specific application to advanced encryption standard (AES). Then it is extended to other substitution-permutation network (SPN)-based block ciphers, such as LED and SKINNY, both of which have unique features that EPFA fits well. To improve the efficiency of EPFA, a parallel algorithm based on mixed radix numbers is developed, which fully utilizes the power of GPU. Our experimental results show that EPFA can reduce the number of required ciphertexts to be under 1000, which is only about 40% of the 2500 ciphertexts in previous PFA on AES. In contrast to the single-threaded implementation, the parallel EPFA can have a speedup roughly about 200 times.