Meet-in-the-Middle Differential Fault Analysis on ITUbee Block Cipher

Abstract

Differential fault analysis (DFA) was introduced by Biham and Shamir. It is a powerful analysis technique to retrieve the secret key by injecting fault into an internal state and utilizing the differences between the correct ciphertexts and the faulty ciphertexts. Based on the idea of meet-in-the-middle, some differential characters can help to recover the key of some symmetric ciphers. At CHES 2011, this technique was utilized to give analyses on AES. In this article, we propose several DFA schemes on ITUbee, a software-oriented block symmetric cipher for resource-constrained devices based on the meet-in-the-middle idea. Our attacks are efficient enough and more powerful than previous works. Furthermore, the attacks in this article break the protection countermeasure, meaning we have to review the protection method on devices for ITUbee.