Efficient Fault Diagnosis Schemes for Reliable Lightweight Cryptographic ISO/IEC Standard CLEFIA Benchmarked on ASIC and FPGA

Lightweight block ciphers are essential for providing low-cost confidentiality to sensitive constrained applications. Nonetheless, this confidentiality does not guarantee their reliability in the presence of natural and malicious faults. In this paper, fault diagnosis schemes for the lightweight internationally standardized block cipher CLEFIA are proposed. This symmetric-key cipher is compatible with yet lighter in hardware than the Advanced Encryption Standard and enables the implementation of cryptographic functionality with low complexity and power consumption. To the best of the authors´ knowledge, there has been no fault diagnosis scheme presented in the literature for the CLEFIA to date. In addition to providing fault diagnosis approaches for the linear blocks in the encryption and the decryption of the CLEFIA, error detection approaches are presented for the nonlinear S-boxes, applicable to their composite-field implementations as well as their lookup table realizations. Through fault-injection simulations, the proposed schemes are benchmarked, and it is shown that they achieve error coverage of close to 100%. Finally, both application-specific integrated circuit and field-programmable gate array implementations of the proposed error detection structures are presented to assess their efficiency and overhead. The proposed fault diagnosis architectures make the implementations of the International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission-standardized CLEFIA more reliable.