Differential fault attack on the PRINCE block cipher

Abstract

PRINCE is a new lightweight block cipher proposed at the ASIACRYPT'2012 conference. In this paper two observations on the linear layer of the cipher are presented. Based on the observations a differential fault attack is applied to the cipher under a random nibble-level fault model, aiming to use fault injections as few as possible. The attack uniquely determines the 128-bit key of the cipher using less than 7 fault injections on average. In the case with 4 fault injections, the attack limits the size of key space to less than 2 18. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.