Efficient and Reliable Error Detection Architectures of Hash-Counter-Hash Tweakable Enciphering Schemes

Through pseudorandom permutation, tweakable enciphering schemes (TES) constitute block cipher modes of operation which perform length-preserving computations. The state-of-the-art research has focused on different aspects of TES, including implementations on hardware [field-programmable gate array (FPGA)/application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)] and software (hard/soft-core microcontrollers) platforms, algorithmic security, and applicability to sensitive, security-constrained usage models. In this article, we propose efficient approaches for protecting such schemes against natural and malicious faults. Specifically, noting that intelligent attackers do not merely get confined to injecting multiple faults, one major benchmark for the proposed schemes is evaluation toward biased and burst fault models. We evaluate a variant of TES, i.e., the Hash-Counter-Hash scheme, which involves polynomial hashing as other variants are either similar or do not constitute finite field multiplication which, by far, is the most involved operation in TES. In addition, we benchmark the overhead and performance degradation on the ASIC platform. The results of our error injection simulations and ASIC implementations show the suitability of the proposed approaches for a wide range of applications including deeply embedded systems.