Prevention of Fault Attacks in ASCON Authenticated Cipher Using Cellular Automata.

ASCON is a sponge function based authenticated encryption (AE) scheme chosen in CAESAR competition for lightweight applications. Its suitability for high performance applications make it desirable in environments like Internet of Things (IoT) where large number of very constrained devices communicate with high-end servers. The drawback is that fault analyses like Statistical Ineffective fault attack (SIFA) and Sub-Set Fault Analysis (SSFA) are possible. In this paper, we modify ASCON 128a exploiting the pseudo-random properties of Cellular Automata (CA) to prevent these attacks.