Breaking Trivium Stream Cipher Implemented in ASIC Using Experimental Attacks and DFA.

Area of Science:

• Cryptography
• Computer Engineering
• Information Security

Background:

• Lightweight cryptographic ciphers are essential for Internet of Things (IoT) security.
• Trivium is a stream cipher designed for resource-constrained environments.
• Attacking cryptographic implementations is crucial for identifying vulnerabilities and improving security.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a method for attacking Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations of the Trivium stream cipher.
• To recover secret keys from Trivium using a novel attack technique.
• To validate the attack's effectiveness on real hardware.

Main Methods:

• Developed an attack setup combining clock manipulation and Differential Fault Analysis (DFA).
• Injected transient faults into the Trivium cipher during operation.
• Utilized DFA to analyze correct and faulty outputs to recover the internal state.
• Designed a backward version of Trivium to derive secret keys from the recovered internal state.

Main Results:

• Successfully recovered secret keys from ASIC implementations of Trivium.
• Achieved 100% key recovery rate in experimental attacks under realistic conditions.
• Demonstrated the effectiveness of the combined clock manipulation and DFA attack.

Conclusions:

• The proposed attack method is highly effective for breaking Trivium implementations on ASICs.
• This research highlights security weaknesses in lightweight ciphers and informs future cryptographic designs.
• The findings have significant implications for securing IoT devices and sensitive information exchange.