Paper 2013/043

Differential Fault Attack on the PRINCE Block Cipher

Ling Song and Lei Hu

Abstract

PRINCE is a new lightweight block cipher proposed at the ASIACRYPT'2012 conference. In this paper two observations on the linear layer of the cipher are presented. Based on the observations a differential fault attack is applied to the cipher under a random nibble-level fault model. The attack uniquely determines the 128-bit key of the cipher using less than 7 fault injections averagely. In the case with 4 fault injections, the attack limits the key to a space of size less than $2^{18}$ statistically.