Abstract

In this article, we provide the first third-party security analysis of the PRINCE lightweight block cipher, and the underlying \(\mathtt{PRINCE}_{core}\). First, while no claim was made by the authors regarding related-key attacks, we show that one can attack the full cipher with only a single pair of related keys, and then reuse the same idea to derive an attack in the single-key model for the full \(\mathtt{PRINCE}_{core}\) for several instances of the \(\alpha \) parameter (yet not the one randomly chosen by the designers). We also show how to exploit the structural linear relations that exist for PRINCE in order to obtain a key recovery attack that slightly breaks the security claims for the full cipher. We analyze the application of integral attacks to get the best known key-recovery attack on a reduced version of the PRINCE cipher. Finally, we provide time-memory-data tradeoffs that require only known plaintext-ciphertext data and that can be applied to full PRINCE.