Efficient DFA on SPN-based block ciphers and its application to the LED block cipher

This paper presents an efficient method for differential fault analysis (DFA) on substitution-permutation network (SPN)-based block ciphers. A combination of a permutation cancellation and an algebraic key filtering technique makes it possible to reduce the computational cost of key filtering significantly and therefore perform DFAs with new fault models injected at an earlier round, which defeats conventional countermeasures duplicating or recalculating the rounds of interest. In this paper, we apply the proposed DFA to the LED block cipher. Whereas existing DFAs employ fault models injected at the 30th round, the proposed DFA first employs a fault model injected at the 29th round. We demonstrate that the proposed DFA can obtain the key candidates with only one pair of correct and faulty ciphertexts in about 2.1 h even from the 29th round fault model and the resulting key space is reduced to 24.04