A Security Analysis of IoT Encryption : Side Channel Cube Attack on SIMECK32/64

Abstract

Simeck, a lightweight block cipher has been proposed to be one of the encryption that can be employed in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Therefore, this paper presents the security of the Simeck32/64 block cipher against side-channel cube attack. We exhibit our attack against Simeck32/64 using the Hamming weight leakage assumption to extract linearly independent equations in key bits. We have been able to find 32 linearly independent equations in 32 key variables by only considering the second bit from the LSB of the Hamming weight leakage of the internal state on the fourth round of the cipher. This enables our attack to improve previous attacks on Simeck32/64 within side-channel attack model with better time and data complexity of 2 35 and 2 11.29 respectively.

Key‐dependent side‐channel cube attack on CRAFT

“…Dinur and Shamir [34] introduced the concept of a side-channel cube attack in which the adversary is assumed to have access to only one bit of information about the internal state instead of the ciphertext bits. For detailed information on side-channel cube attacks and their applications, refer to [35][36][37][38][39][40][41].…”

“…Side-channel attacks using Hamming weight leakage have been investigated in various studies [18,42,43]. Dinur and Shamir [34] proposed reading the second Hamming weight bit from the least significant bit (LSB), which can also be found in several other works, such as in [35,37,44]. In other related work, Zhao and others [40] proposed a practical method to measure the Hamming weight leakage from a cipher implementation on an 8-bit microcontroller.…”