An Effective Differential Fault Analysis on the Serpent Cryptosystem in the Internet of Things

Due to the strong attacking ability, fast speed, simple implementation and other characteristics, differential fault analysis has become an important method to evaluate the security of cryptosystem in the Internet of Things. As one of the AES finalists, the Serpent is a 128-bit Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) cryptosystem. It has 32 rounds with the variable key length between 0 and 256 bits, which is flexible to provide security in the Internet of Things. On the basis of the byte-oriented model and the differential analysis, we propose an effective differential fault attack on the Serpent cryptosystem. Mathematical analysis and simulating experiment show that the attack could recover its secret key by introducing 48 faulty ciphertexts. The result in this study describes that the Serpent is vulnerable to differential fault analysis in detail. It will be beneficial to the analysis of the same type of other iterated crypto systems.