GRINCH: A Cache Attack Against GIFT Lightweight Cipher
Cezar Reinbrecht1,a, Abdullah Aljuffri1,b, Said Hamdioui1,b, Mottaqiallah Taouil1,d and Johanna Sepúlveda2
1Delft University of Technology – EEMCS Faculty Delft, The Netherlands
ac.r.wedigreinbrecht@tudelft.nl
ba.a.aljuffri@tudelft.nl
cs.hamdioui@tudelft.nl
dm.taouil@tudelft.nl
2Airbus Defense and Space Munich, Germany
johanna.sepulveda@airbus.com
ABSTRACT
The National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) has recently started a competition with the objective to standardize lightweight cryptography (LWC). The winning schemes will be deployed in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, a key step for the current and future information and communication technology market. GIFT is an efficient lightweight cipher and it is used by one-fourth of the LWC candidates in the NIST LWC competition. Thus, its security evaluation is critical. One vital threat to the security are so-called logical side-channel attacks based on cache observations. In this work, we propose a novel cache attack on GIFT referred to as GRINCH. We analyzed the vulnerabilities of GIFT and exploited them in our attack. The results show that the attack is effective and that the full key could be recovered with less than 400 encryptions.
Keywords: Lightweight Cipher, GIFT Cipher, Cache Attack, Micro-architectural Attack.
