Differential Fault Attack and Meet-in-the-Middle Attack on Block Cipher LED

Abstract

In this paper, on the basis of the nibble-based faulty model and the differential analysis principle, we propose a kind of attack on the new low-cost LED block cipher which combine differential fault attack with meet-in-the-middle attack. We inject the nibble faulty at round 29, which is earlier than other papers. More precisely, ciphertext need to be multiplied by a matrix before add the key in order to reduce the effect from key spreading. Finally, the key candidates are recovered by solving the equation set. Hence the secret key bits can be recovered faster than exhaustive search.