Black-Box Side-Channel Cube Attacks on Present-Like Ciphers

Abstract

Side-channel cube attack (SCCA) is a powerful cryptanalysis technique that combines side-channel and cube attacks. This paper leverages black-box SCCA(BB-SCCA) on lightweight block ciphers. Firstly, the framework and the evaluation metrics of BB-SCCA is presented. Then, under Hamming weight leakage model, we apply BB-SCCA to PRESENT and its derivatives such as Small Present-[n] and EPCBC, the analysis of the results is provided. Finally, we present some advices for BB-SCCA resistent cipher design. Both the results and the analysis show that PRESENT-like ciphers have their intrinsic defects in the design of S-Box and the permutation layer. If the Hamming weight of certain bits(i.e., a nibble or a byte) is leaked in the third round after the addRoundKey operation, the first round key for PRESENT-like ciphers can be extracted easily with less than 210 chosen plaintexts.