Differential Fault Analysis on DES Middle Rounds

Abstract. Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is a powerful cryptanalytic technique that disturbs cryptographic computations and exploits
erroneous results to infer secret keys. Over the last decade, many works
have described and improved DFA techniques against block ciphers thus
showing an inherent need to protect their implementations. A simple and
widely used solution is to perform the computation twice and to check
that the same result is obtained. Since DFA against block ciphers usually
targets the last few rounds, one does not need to protect the whole ciphering thus saving computation time. However the number of rounds to
protect must be chosen very carefully in order to prevent security flaws.
To determine this number, one must study DFA targeting middle rounds
of the cipher. In this paper, we address this issue for the Data Encryption
Standard (DES) algorithm. We describe an attack that breaks DES by
introducing some faults at the end of round 9, 10, 11 or 12, more or less
efficiently depending on the fault model and the round numbe