Research On Power Analysis Attack And Countermeasure For Light Weight Block Cipher Algorithm

Smart cards and RFID devices have been applied in many fields, such asfinancial, logistics, manufacturing and so on. It is significant to ensure the safety ofinformation in these devices, which is closely related to the development of nationaleconomy and the safety of national information security. However, due to the harshrequirements for resources and power consumption in these devices, traditionalcryptographic algorithm is no longer applicable. Lightweight block cipher is a moresafety and effective solutions to the requirements.Power analysis attack (PAA) is a way to speculate the key by analyzing thecorrelation between the power consumption and the data processed in cryptographicdevice. It has posed great threats to the information security. Because of therequirements of hardware resource and power consumption to the lightweightdevice, and lightweight block cipher is vulnerable to be attacked, there is importanttheoretical significance and application value to evaluate the capability oflightweight cryptographic devices against power analysis attack and findlightweight countermeasures to resist PAA.In the study of the countermeasures to PAA, lightweight block cipherPRESENT and the RTL implementation of PRESENT have been studied firstly.Mathematical theory of CPA has been learned at the same time. Then thesimulation-level platform based on PrimeTime PX and practical platform based onFPGA was built, respectively. Successfull CPA attacks to PRESENT attributes to theanalysis of power information collected by these two methods using MATLAB.Finally, the lightweight methodology against CPA attack-threshold masking wasstudied and used in PRESENT. Besides, FPGA based True Random NumberGenerator was also designed.Through the theoretical research and related experiments, it is confirmed thatthe lightweight block cipher PRSENT is vulnerable to PAA. The cipher PRESENTis unsafe without any countermeasure. The proposed threshold masking method isefficient to the first order CPA attack and reducing resource consumption. Therefore,it is suitable for the lightweight block cipher. Furthermore, the power simulationplatform, FPGA based power collecting platform and True Random Number Generator can be used in other block cipher. They are important to the furtherresearch.