Double Rounds driven Electromagnetic Analysis Attack for a Lightweight Block Cipher Simeck and its Evaluation

Abstract

Since Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely used, embedded devices have the risk of illegal attacks. Therefore, lightweight block ciphers, which can be implemented on embedded devices in small area, have been attracted attention as the countermeasure. Simeck is a new lightweight block cipher which can be implemented in the smallest area among lightweight block ciphers. Recently, regarding the security of a cryptographic circuit, the risk of electromagnetic analysis attack has been reported. However, no study of electromagnetic analysis attack for Simeck has been reported. Therefore, this study proposes a new electromagnetic analysis attack for a lightweight block cipher Simeck. The proposed method performs the analysis using double rounds. Moreover, the proposed method performs build-in processing using already known information and realizes the high attack accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first attack for Simeck. Experiments using an actual device introduce the vulnerability of Simeck and the validity of the proposed method.