International Association
for Cryptologic Research

A protection circuit can be added into cryptographic systems to detect both soft errors and injected faults required by Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) attacks. While such protection can improve the reliability of the target devices significantly and counteract DFA, they will also incur extra power consumption and other resource overhead. In this paper, we analyze the side-channel power leakage of AES protection methods against fault attacks and quantify the amount. We implement six different schemes and launch correlation power analysis attacks on them. The results show that the protection circuits have all increased the power leakage and therefore make the system more vulnerable to power analysis attacks. We further compare different protection schemes in terms of power consumption, area, fault coverage, and side-channel leakage. Our results demonstrate trade-offs among multiple design metrics, and suggest that reliability, security, and costs have to be all considered together in the design phase of cryptographic systems.