The Security Weakness of Block Cipher Piccolo against Fault Analysis

Abstract

Piccolo is a 64-bit lightweight block cipher which is able to be implemented in constrained hardware environments such as a wireless sensor network. Fault analysis is a type of side channel attack and cube attack is an algebraic attack finding sufficiently low-degree polynomials in a cipher. In this paper, we show a fault analysis on the Piccolo by using cube attack. We find 16 linear equations corresponding to a round function F by cube attack, which are used to fault analysis. Our attack has the complexity of 2(8.49) and 2(9.21) encryptions with fault injections of target bit positions into Piccolo-80 and Piccolo-128, respectively. And our attack needs 2(20.86) and 2(21.60) encryptions with random 4-bit fault injections for Piccolo-80 and Piccolo-128, respectively.