Efficient Hamming weight-based side-channel cube attacks on PRESENT

The side-channel cube attack (SCCA) is a powerful cryptanalysis technique that combines the side-channel and cube attack. This paper proposes several advanced techniques to improve the Hamming weight-based SCCA (HW-SCCA) on the block cipher PRESENT. The new techniques utilize non-linear equations and an iterative scheme to extract more information from leakage. The new attacks need only 28.95 chosen plaintexts to recover 72 key bits of PRESENT-80 and 29.78 chosen plaintexts to recover 121 key bits of PRESENT-128. To the best of our knowledge, these are the most efficient SCCAs on PRESENT-80/128. To show the feasibility of the proposed techniques, real attacks have been conducted on PRESENT on an 8-bit microcontroller, which are the first SCCAs on PRESENT on a real device. The proposed HW-SCCA can successfully break PRESENT implementations even if they have some countermeasures such as random delay and masking.

► We propose several techniques to enhance side-channel cube attack (SCCA). ► We report the most efficient Hamming weight based SCCAs on PRESENT. ► We conduct the first SCCAs with physical experiments. ► We show that SCCA has certain advantages over CPA especially when some countermeasures, such as random delay and masking, are used.