PRINCE under Differential Fault Attack: Now in 3D

Abstract

Fault analysis is one of the most studied physical attacks primarily due to the inherent ease of implementation. This work investigates integral and differential fault analysis attacks on the well-known lightweight block-cipher PRINCE. The work begins by identifying new integral properties of PRINCE which are not restricted to be symmetric around the middle rounds. The work also identifies new slow diffusion trails on the cipher. Both properties are exploited to mount practical integral and differential fault attacks on PRINCE that uniquely recover the key. The integral fault attack has a time complexity of 236 and 220 with 15 nibble faults in round 8.5 and 9.5 respectively while the slow diffusion differential fault attack works with 4 bit-faults in the 10th round with a complexity of 222. Finally, the fact that the faults can be injected very close to the middle rounds forms one of the interesting aspects of this work and adds to the state-of-the-art on contemporary results on PRINCE available in the literature. Moreover, a 3-D visualization model of PRINCE state has also been proposed in this work which can be used to extend or improve existing attacks on PRINCE.