Coding Schemes for Arithmetic and Logic Operations - How Robust Are They?

In the past many coding schemes have been proposed to render arithmetic and logic units fault tolerant. However, most schemes are suited for safety rather than for security applications, i.e. they were not designed to protect against malicious fault injections. Even articles considering an adversary as the source of faults restrict the error-detection discussion to partial fault models. In this article, we investigate the possibilities of an adversary to inject an undetected fault in different coding schemes. In contrast to other works, we analyze the interaction of erroneous operands and operations. Such an analysis yields quite different results than traditional evaluations. These new results show that each of the schemes has serious weaknesses and neither of them can guarantee a universal protection. Thus, a hybrid approach is favorable to counteract fault attacks.

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