• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.807-816
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• 2022

See-In-The-Middle (SITM) is an analysis technique that uses Side-Channel information for differential cryptanalysis. This attack collects unmasked middle-round power traces when implementing block ciphers to select plaintext pairs that satisfy the attacker's differential pattern and utilize them for differential cryptanalysis to recover the key. Romulus, one of the final candidates for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization competition, is based on Tweakable block cipher Skinny-128-384+. In this paper, the SITM attack is applied to Skinny-128-384 implemented with 14-round partial masking. This attack not only increased depth by one round, but also significantly reduced the time/data complexity to 2^14.93/2^14.93. Depth refers to the round position of the block cipher that collects the power trace, and it is possible to measure the appropriate number of masking rounds required when applying the masking technique to counter this attack. Furthermore, we extend the attack to Romulus's Nonce-based AE mode Romulus-N, and Tweakey's structural features show that it can attack with less complexity than Skinny-128-384.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.149-156
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• 2011

In the recent years, power analysis attacks were widely investigated, and so various countermeasures have been proposed. In the case of block ciphers, masking methods that blind the intermediate values in the en/decryption computations are well-known among these countermeasures. But the cost of non-linear part is extremely high in the masking method of block cipher, and so the countermeasure for S-box must be efficiently constructed in the case of AES, ARIA and SEED. Existing countermeasures for S-box use the masked S-box table to require 256 bytes RAM corresponding to one S-box. But, the usage of the these countermeasures is not adequate in the lightweight security devices having the small size of RAM. In this paper, we propose the new countermeasure not using the masked S-box table to make up for this weak point. Also, the new countermeasure reduces time-complexity as well as the usage of RAM because this does not consume the time for generating masked S-box table.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.181-188
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• 2023

Block cipher is not expected to be safe for quantum computer, as Grover's algorithm reduces the security strength by accelerating brute-force attacks on symmetric key ciphers. So it is necessary to check the post-quantum security strength by implementing quantum circuit for the target cipher. In this paper, we propose the optimal quantum circuit implementation result designed as a technique to minimize the use of quantum resources (qubits, quantum gates) for SIMECK lightweight cryptography, and explain the operation of each quantum circuit. The implemented SIMECK quantum circuit is used to check the estimation result of quantum resources and calculate the Grover attack cost. Finally, the post-quantum strength of SIMECK lightweight cryptography is evaluated. As a result of post-quantum security strength evaluation, all SIMECK family cipher failed to reach NIST security strength. Therefore, it is expected that the safety of SIMECK cipher is unclear when large-scale quantum computers appear. About this, it is judged that it would be appropriate to increase the block size, the number of rounds, and the key length to increase the security strength.