Research on Correlation Power Analysis Attack against Piccolo

To evaluate an ultra-lightweight blockcipher Piccolo's ability to counteract Power Analysis Attack (PAA), an attack model, which focuses on the first round of Piccolo, was proposed and Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) was conducted on this cipher based on a power simulation acquisition platform. Due to the whiten keys and round permutation for the first round of Piccolo, attacking keys including RK_0L, RK_0R, WK₀ and WK₁ were divided into six sub-keys, which were disclosed one by one. This approach can reduce the 80-bit primary key search space from 2⁸⁰ to (2×2²⁰+2×2⁴ + 2×2⁸+2¹⁶) and make it possible to recover the primary key. The attack results show that 500 power traces are enough to recover Piccolo's 80-bit primary key. It is concluded that the hardware implementation of Piccolo without any countermeasure is vulnerable to CPA and some countermeasures should be used. This work is the first known report about the security of Piccolo against PAA.