Side-Channel Linearization Attack on Unrolled Trivium Hardware

Abstract

This paper presents a new side-channel attack (SCA) on unrolled implementations of stream ciphers, with a particular focus on Trivium. Most conventional SCAs predominantly concentrate on leakage of some first rounds prior to the sufficient diffusion of the secret key and initial vector (IV). However, recently, unrolled hardware implementation has become common and practical, which achieves higher throughput and energy efficiency compared to a round-based hardware. The applicability of conventional SCAs to such unrolled hardware is unclear because the leakage of the first rounds from unrolled hardware is hardly observed. In this paper, focusing on Trivium, we propose a novel SCA on unrolled stream cipher hardware, which can exploit leakage of rounds latter than 80, while existing SCAs exploited intermediate values earlier than 80 rounds. We first analyze the algebraic equations representing the intermediate values of these rounds and present the recursive restricted linear decomposition (RRLD) strategy. This approach uses correlation power analysis (CPA) to estimate the intermediate values of latter rounds. Furthermore, we present a chosen-IV strategy for a successful key recovery through linearization. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed SCA achieves the key recovery of a 288-round unrolled Trivium hardware implementation using 360,000 traces. Finally, we evaluate the performance of unrolled Trivium hardware implementations to clarify the trade-off between performance and SCA (in)security. The proposed SCA requires 34.5 M traces for a key recovery of 384-round unrolled Trivium implementation and is not applicable to 576-round unrolled hardware.