Internet of Things connects lots of small constrained devices to the Internet. As in any other environment, communication security is important and cryptographic algorithms are one of many elements that we use in order to keep messages secure. It is necessary to use algorithms that do not require high computational power, lightweight ciphers are therefore an ideal candidate for this purpose. Since these devices work in various environments, it is necessary to test security of implementations of cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we explore a possibility of attacking an ultralightweight cipher PRESENT by using a multiple fault attack. Utilizing the Differential Fault Analysis technique, we were able to recover the secret key with two faulty encryptions and an exhaustive search of 216 remaining key bits. Our attack aims at four nibbles in the penultimate round of the cipher, causing faulty output in all nibbles of the output. We also provide a practical attack scenario by exploiting Hardware Trojan (HT) technique for the proposed fault injection in a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA.
The most efficient attack so far was proposed by @cite_20 . They used a 2-byte random fault model, attacking the algorithm state after round 28. For PRESENT-80, they needed two 2-byte faults and for PRESENT-128 they needed three 2-byte faults and an exhaustive search of @math on average.
@cite_20
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PRESENT is a hardware-optimized 64-bit lightweight block cipher which supports 80-and 128-bit secret keys. In this paper, we propose a differential fault analysis DFA on PRESENT-80 128. The proposed attack is based on a 2-byte random fault model. In detail, by inducing several 2-byte random faults in input registers after 28 rounds, our attack recovers the secret key of the target algorithm. From simulation results, our attacks on PRESENT-80 128 can recover the secret key by inducing only two and three 2-byte random faults, respectively. These are superior to known DFA results on them.