Combined Side-Channel Attacks on a Lightweight Prince Cipher Implementation
Soner Seçkiner, Selçuk Köse · 2021
Side-channel attacks have recently become one of primary threats that target modern computing devices. Several techniques have been proposed to improve the strength of side-channel attacks. Preprocessing is one of those techniques that improves the side-channel attacks by processing the measured leakage traces before performing the statistical analysis. The advantages of preprocessing techniques can potentially increase the performance and precision of side-channel attacks. Preprocessing of the measured leakage typically leads to faster side-channel attacks that require less number of measurements. A novel combined attack which utilizes the preprocessing techniques effectively is proposed in this work. Mutual information analysis (MIA) and correlation power analysis (CPA) are implemented for the preprocessing and attack steps interchangeably. For the first time, a combined attack is performed on a lightweight Prince cipher. The proposed preprocessing technique is demonstrated to reduce the required number of measurements to disclose a secret key by up to 25%.