Timing and hamming weight attacks on minimal cost encryption scheme

Abstract

The timing and Hamming weight attacks on the data encryption standard (DES) cryptosystem for minimal cost encryption scheme is presented in this article. In the attack, timing information on encryption processing is used to select and collect effective plaintexts for attack. Then the collected plaintexts are utilized to infer the expanded key differences of the secret key, from which most bits of the expanded secret key are recovered. The remaining bits of the expanded secret key are deduced by the correlations between Hamming weight values of the input of the S-boxes in the first-round. Finally, from the linear relation of the encryption time and the secret key's Hamming weight, the entire 56 bits of the secret key are thoroughly recovered. Using the attack, the minimal cost encryption scheme can be broken with 2 23 known plaintexts and about 2 23 calculations at a success rate a > 99%. The attack has lower computing complexity, and the method is more effective than other previous methods.