Improved Side Channel Attacks on TRIVIUM, GRAIN-128-AEAD, ACORN-128 v3 and ASCON-128a

Abstract

Side Channel Attacks (SCA) exploit physical information leakage from devices performing cryptographic operations, posing significant security threats. While SCA has been extensively studied in the context of block ciphers, similar analyses on stream ciphers and constructions like authenticated encryption are less explored. In this paper, we present a novel enhancement to existing SCA techniques based on the hamming weight model for stream ciphers. We have identified critical oversights in previous SCA attack models, allowing us to introduce additional inequalities that enhance the model’s effectiveness. For TRIVIUM and GRAIN-128-AEAD, we demonstrate that a practical state recovery attack can be achieved in significantly less time than existing attacks on the HW/32 model. Furthermore, we show that our improved model is capable of handling the HW/64 model and can recover the state even with noisy traces within a few hours. Additionally, we extend our model to the authenticated encryption schemes ACORN-128 v3 and ASCON-128a, demonstrating its broader applicability.