A Security Analysis of IoT Encryption: Side-channel Cube Attack on Simeck32/64

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a side-channel cube attack on the Simeck32/64 cipher, revealing vulnerabilities and improving attack efficiency in IoT security contexts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel side-channel cube attack on Simeck32/64 using Hamming weight leakage, achieving better complexity than previous methods.

Findings

Successfully extracted 32 key bits using side-channel analysis.

Reduced attack complexity to 2^35 time and 2^11.29 data.

Demonstrated vulnerability of Simeck32/64 in IoT applications.

Abstract

Simeck, a lightweight block cipher has been proposed to be one of the encryption that can be employed in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Therefore, this paper presents the security of the Simeck32/64 block cipher against side-channel cube attack. We exhibit our attack against Simeck32/64 using the Hamming weight leakage assumption to extract linearly independent equations in key bits. We have been able to find 32 linearly independent equations in 32 key variables by only considering the second bit from the LSB of the Hamming weight leakage of the internal state on the fourth round of the cipher. This enables our attack to improve previous attacks on Simeck32/64 within side-channel attack model with better time and data complexity of 2^35 and 2^11.29 respectively.