Paper 2021/1190

Differential Fault Attack on Lightweight Block Cipher PIPO

SeongHyuck Lim, JaeSeung Han, Tae-Ho Lee, and Dong-Guk Han

Abstract

With the recent development of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, related security issues are also increasing. In particular, the possibility of accessing and hijacking cryptographic devices is also increasing due to the rapid increase in usage of these devices. Therefore, research on cryptographic technologies that can provide a safe environment even in resource-constrained environments has been actively conducted. Among them, there are increasing security issues of side-channel analysis for devices due to their physical accessibility. The lightweight block cipher PIPO was recently proposed in ICISC 2020 to address these issues. The PIPO has the characteristic of providing robust security strength while having less overhead when using the side-channel analysis countermeasures. A differential fault attack is a type of side-channel analysis that induces fault in cryptographic operations and utilizes difference information that occurs. Differential fault attacks on the PIPO have not yet been studied. This paper proposed a single-bit flip-based differential fault attack on the lightweight block cipher PIPO for the first time. We show that simulations enable the recovery of the correct secret key with about 98% probability through 64 fault ciphertexts. Therefore, the PIPO does not provide security against differential fault attacks. When using the PIPO cipher on IoT devices, designers must apply appropriate countermeasures against fault injection attacks.