Differential fault analysis of Hummingbird

Hummingbird is a lightweight encryption algorithm proposed by Engels, Fan, Gong, Hu and Smith at FC′10. Unlike other lightweight cryptographic primitives which can be classified as either block ciphers or stream ciphers, Hummingbird has a hybrid structure of block cipher and stream cipher with 16-bit block size, 256-bit key size, and 80-bit internal state. Preliminary analysis conducted by the cipher's designers show that it is resistant to most common attacks against block ciphers and stream ciphers. In this paper, we present a differential fault analysis attack on Hummingbird. The fault model in which we analyze the cipher is the one in which the attacker is assumed to be able to fault a random word before the linear transform, after the s-boxes, of the four block ciphers which are used in the Hummingbird encryption process but cannot control the exact location of injected faults. Our attack, which recovers the 256-bit key, requires around 50 faults and 266 steps.

[1]  Guang Gong,et al.  Hummingbird: Ultra-Lightweight Cryptography for Resource-Constrained Devices , 2010, Financial Cryptography Workshops.

[2]  Guang Gong,et al.  Lightweight implementation of Hummingbird cryptographic algorithm on 4-bit microcontrollers , 2009, 2009 International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, (ICITST).

[3]  Siva Sai Yerubandi,et al.  Differential Power Analysis , 2002 .

[4]  Eli Biham,et al.  Impossible Fault Analysis of RC4 and Differential Fault Analysis of RC4 , 2005, FSE.

[5]  Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen.  Cryptanalysis of Hummingbird-1 , 2010, FSE.

[6]  Eli Biham,et al.  Differential Fault Analysis of Secret Key Cryptosystems , 1997, CRYPTO.

[7]  David Naccache,et al.  The Sorcerer's Apprentice Guide to Fault Attacks , 2006, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[8]  Adi Shamir,et al.  Fault Analysis of Stream Ciphers , 2004, CHES.

[9]  Eltayeb Salih Abuelyaman,et al.  Differential Fault Analysis , 2005, International Conference on Internet Computing.

[10]  Jean-Jacques Quisquater,et al.  A Differential Fault Attack Technique against SPN Structures, with Application to the AES and KHAZAD , 2003, CHES.

[11]  Markus G. Kuhn,et al.  Low Cost Attacks on Tamper Resistant Devices , 1997, Security Protocols Workshop.

[12]  Chong Hee Kim,et al.  Differential Fault Analysis against AES-192 and AES-256 with Minimal Faults , 2010, 2010 Workshop on Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography.

[13]  Paul C. Kocher,et al.  Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSS, and Other Systems , 1996, CRYPTO.