The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract Linked Ineffective Fault Analysis (LIFA) is a novel fault analysis technique that operates without requiring input control and demonstrates resilience against noise compared to Statistical Ineffective Fault Analysis (SIFA), while maintaining similar attack assumptions. However, prior studies on LIFA have focused primarily on SPN block ciphers, leaving the security of the DES cipher one of the Feistel ciphers unexplored. Furthermore, the application of LIFA in the presence of multiple faults remains unaddressed. This paper bridges these gaps by applying LIFA to the widely utilized DES cipher, aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of this attack on Feistel-based structures. We effectively apply LIFA across various scenarios and demonstrate the feasibility of inducing multiple linked faults. Our results reveal that the nibble-based structure of DES allows for the establishment of two simultaneous links instead of one, significantly enhancing the efficacy of fault attacks on DES. To validate our approach, we conducted both simulations and real-world experiments using frequency glitch fault injection on an ATMEGA328p microcontroller. The results show that the proposed LIFA framework for the DES cipher achieves superior performance compared to existing methods such as SIFA, further advancing the state of cryptographic fault analysis.