Paper 2015/602 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2015/602 ↗

Combined Side-Channel and Fault Analysis Attack on Protected Grain Family of Stream Ciphers

Abstract

In this paper, we first demonstrate a new Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attack technique against the Grain family of stream ciphers (Grain v1 and Grain-128) by resynchronizing the cipher multiple times with the same value of the secret \emph{key} and randomly generated different initialization vectors (IVs). Subsequently, we develop a combined side channel and fault analysis attack strategy targeting various fault attack countermeasures for the Grain cipher family. We considered clock glitch induced faults occurring in practice for a hardware implementation of the cipher to devise our novel attack technique. Our proposed combined attack strategy works well even if the \emph{useful} ciphertexts are not available to the adversary. Further, the power trace classifications of a Grain cipher implementation on SASEBO G-II standard side channel evaluation board is shown in order to validate our proposed attack against the cipher. The captured power traces were analyzed using Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) learning algorithm based multiclass classifiers to classify the power traces into the respective Hamming distance (HD) classes. To extract power samples with high information about HD classes, Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) metric was chosen for feature selection. The experimental results of power trace classifications of test set showed a high success rate of $98\%$ when the five largest SNR sample instants over a clock cycle were chosen as features. Our proposed attack strategy can also be extended to other stream cipher designs based on Fibonacci configured shift registers.