Differential Fault Analysis on CLEFIA

Hua Chen, Wenling Wu, Dengguo Feng

Abstract: CLEFIA is a new 128-bit block cipher proposed by SONY corporation recently. The fundamental structure of CLEFIA is a generalized Feistel structure consisting of 4 data lines. In this paper, the strength of CLEFIA against the differential fault attack is explored. Our attack adopts the byte-oriented model of random faults. Through inducing randomly one byte fault in one round, four bytes of faults can be simultaneously obtained in the next round, which can efficiently reduce the total induce times in the attack. After attacking the last several rounds’ encryptions, the original secret key can be recovered based on some analysis of the key schedule. The data complexity analysis and experiments show that only about 18 faulty ciphertexts are needed to recover the entire 128-bit secret key and about 54 faulty ciphertexts for 192/256-bit keys.