Power Analysis and Protection on SPECK and Its Application in IoT

Abstract

Emerging applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT) promotes the development of lightweight cryptography. SPECK is a lightweight block cipher, specially designed for limited resource devices that was presented by National Security Agency. Nevertheless, before using SPECK in any practical application, protection against side-channel attacks must be paid attention to. In this paper, we take two attack positions into account and make effort to implement correlation power analysis on a naive software implementation of SPECK algorithm in the IoT application scenario. Our experimental results show that the real key fixed in the register can be successfully recovered when attack the XOR operations, while there is always an interference item that confuses the correct key when attack the modulo addition operation. Furthermore, we proposal a countermeasure against power attacks in the IoT application, and the protected SPECK only cost 53.01%, 6.27% and 318.18% of extra code, RAM and time, respectively.