Design of reliable and secure multipliers by multilinear arithmetic codes

Abstract. We propose an efficient technique for the detection of errors in cryp-tographic circuits introduced by strong adversaries. Previously a number of linear and nonlinear error detection schemes were proposed. Linear codes provide pro-tection only against primitive adversaries which no longer represents practice. On the other hand nonlinear codes provide protection against strong adversaries, but at the price of high area overhead (200–300%). Here we propose a novel error detection technique, based on the random selection of linear arithmetic codes. Under mild assumptions the proposed construction achieves near nonlinear code error detection performance at a lower cost (about 50 % area overhead) due to the fact that no nonlinear operations are needed for the encoder and decoder.