Improved Fault Analysis on SIMECK Ciphers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new fault analysis attack on SIMECK block ciphers, capable of recovering the full master key by fault injection into a single round, highlighting a security vulnerability in lightweight IoT encryption.

Contribution

The paper presents the first efficient fault attack on all SIMECK cipher variants that requires fault injection into only one round, improving attack practicality.

Findings

Attack successfully recovers full master key

Fault injection into a single round suffices

Simulation confirms attack effectiveness

Abstract

The advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) have had a fundamental impact and influence in sharping our rich living experiences. However, since IoT devices are usually resource-constrained, lightweight block ciphers have played a major role in serving as a building block for secure IoT protocols. In CHES 2015, SIMECK, a family of block ciphers, was designed for resource-constrained IoT devices. Since its publication, there have been many analyses on its security. In this paper, under the one bit-flip model, we propose a new efficient fault analysis attack on SIMECK ciphers. Compared to those previously reported attacks, our attack can recover the full master key by injecting faults into only a single round of all SIMECK family members. This property is crucial, as it is infeasible for an attacker to inject faults into different rounds of a SIMECK implementation on IoT devices in the real world. Specifically, our attack is characterized by exercising a deep analysis of differential trail between the correct and faulty immediate ciphertexts. Extensive simulation evaluations are conducted, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of our proposed attack.