Electromagnetic Analysis of an Ultra-Lightweight Cipher: PRESENT
This work addresses security risks for IoT devices by analyzing physical leakages in an ultra-lightweight cipher, but it appears incremental as it extends existing side-channel analysis methods to a new target.
The authors tackled the problem of side-channel vulnerabilities in lightweight cryptography by performing electromagnetic analysis on the PRESENT cipher, finding that correlation electromagnetic analysis (CEMA) attacks are feasible, though specific numerical results are not provided in the abstract.
Side-channel attacks are an unpredictable risk factor in cryptography. Therefore, continuous observations of physical leakages are essential to minimise vulnerabilities associated with cryptographic functions. Lightweight cryptography is a novel approach in progress towards internet-of-things (IoT) security. Thus, it would provide sufficient data and privacy protection in such a constrained ecosystem. IoT devices are resource-limited in terms of data rates (in kbps), power maintainability (battery) as well as hardware and software footprints (physical size, internal memory, RAM/ROM). Due to the difficulty in handling conventional cryptographic algorithms, lightweight ciphers consist of small key sizes, block sizes and few operational rounds. Unlike in the past, affordability to perform side-channel attacks using inexpensive electronic circuitries is becoming a reality. Hence, cryptanalysis of physical leakage in these emerging ciphers is crucial. Among existing studies, power analysis seems to have enough attention in research, whereas other aspects such as electromagnetic, timing, cache and optical attacks continue to be appropriately evaluated to play a role in forensic analysis. As a result, we started analysing electromagnetic emission leakage of an ultra-lightweight block cipher, PRESENT. According to the literature, PRESENT promises to be adequate for IoT devices, and there still seems not to exist any work regarding correlation electromagnetic analysis (CEMA) of it. Firstly, we conducted simple electromagnetic analysis in both time and frequency domains and then proceeded towards CEMA attack modelling. This paper provides a summary of the related literature (IoT, lightweight cryptography, side-channel attacks and EMA), our methodology, current outcomes and future plans for the optimised results.