Side-Channel Collision Attacks Against ASCON
Hao Zhang, Yiwen Gao, Yongbin Zhou, Jingdian Ming · 2025
Side-channel attack poses a significant threat to the security of electronic devices, particularly IoT/AIoT terminals. By leveraging side-channel leakages, collision attacks can efficiently extract the secret keys from cryptographic devices while requiring considerably less computational effort. In this paper, we investigate side-channel collision attacks against ASCON, a lightweight crypto designed for resource-constrained devices, which has been standardized by the NIST. For the first time, we propose a side-channel key recovery attack against ASCON by identifying the collisions in the linear diffusion layer. Using Pearson correlation coefficient and Euclidean distance for internal collision detections, our attack successfully recovers the secret key with approximately 5,000 power traces from an 8-bit software implementation on an AVR device. To further reduce attack complexity, we introduce a novel metric, Locally-Weighted Sum (LWS), which focuses on the most likely points of leakage, thereby decreasing the number of required power traces for successful attack. Our experiment on the same target demonstrates that the LWS-based collision attack can recover the full secret key with approximately 3,000 power traces, a reduction of 40 percent. Our study indicates that ASCON is susceptible to side-channel collision attacks, and bitslice implementations remain vulnerable to such threats.