Correlation Power Analysis on the PRESENT Block Cipher on an Embedded Device

Abstract

Traditional cryptographic techniques have proven to work well on most modern computing devices but they are unsuitable for devices (e.g. IoT devices) where memory, power consumption or processing power is limited. Thus, there has been an increasing amount of work on the design and implementation of lightweight cryptographic algorithms to provide a solution for running cryptography on low resource devices. One particular cryptographic algorithm designed specifically to be used on low resource devices is the PRESENT algorithm. Although the design of PRESENT provides a small memory footprint alongside low power consumption our results show it is susceptible to information leakage when power analysis is performed against a device running this algorithm. In this paper, we present our methodology and results on performing correlation power analysis against this light weight block cipher. Our chosen device under test is an Arduino Uno which was programmed to run the Add Round Key and S-Box functions of PRESENT during the first round of encryptions. Results demonstrate that the Add Round Key function is susceptible to information leakage but a high number of false-positives were observed. Greater success was obtained when targeting the S-Box of the PRESENT algorithm and we were able to derive the first 8 bytes of the key.