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Side-Channel Analysis of Lightweight Ciphers: Does Lightweight Equal Easy?

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Radio Frequency Identification and IoT Security (RFIDSec 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10155))

Abstract

Side-channel attacks represent a powerful category of attacks against cryptographic devices. Still, side-channel analysis for lightweight ciphers is much less investigated than for instance for AES. Although intuition may lead to the conclusion that lightweight ciphers are weaker in terms of side-channel resistance, that remains to be confirmed and quantified. In this paper, we consider various side-channel analysis metrics which should provide an insight on the resistance of lightweight ciphers against side-channel attacks. In particular, for the non-profiled scenario we use the theoretical confusion coefficient and empirical correlation power analysis. Furthermore, we conduct a profiled side-channel analysis using various machine learning attacks on PRESENT and AES. Our results show that the difference between AES and lightweight ciphers is smaller than one would expect. Interestingly, we observe that the studied 4-bit S-boxes have a different side-channel resilience, while the difference in the 8-bit ones is only theoretically present.

This work has been supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation under the project IP-2014-09-4882. In addition, this work was supported in part by the Research Council KU Leuven (C16/15/058) and IOF project EDA-DSE (HB/13/020).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA/CNRS, Rennes, France

    Annelie Heuser

  2. ESAT/COSIC and IMinds, KU Leuven, Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium

    Stjepan Picek & Nele Mentens

  3. TELECOM-ParisTech, Paris, France

    Sylvain Guilley

  4. Secure-IC S.A.S., Rennes, France

    Sylvain Guilley

Authors
  1. Annelie Heuser
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  2. Stjepan Picek
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  3. Sylvain Guilley
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  4. Nele Mentens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Annelie Heuser .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Gerhard P. Hancke

  2. University of London, Egham, United Kingdom

    Konstantinos Markantonakis

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Heuser, A., Picek, S., Guilley, S., Mentens, N. (2017). Side-Channel Analysis of Lightweight Ciphers: Does Lightweight Equal Easy?. In: Hancke, G., Markantonakis, K. (eds) Radio Frequency Identification and IoT Security. RFIDSec 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10155. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62024-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62024-4_7

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62024-4

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