Differential fault analysis on PRINTcipher

The new block cipher PRINTCIPHER was introduced in CHES 2010 as a lightweight block cipher for `integrated circuit´ or IC-`printing´ technology. The key of PRINTCIPHER consist of two sub-key components where the first sub-key is `XORed´ to the state in each round, whereas the second sub-key is used to generate the key-dependent permutations. In this study, the authors describe a new differential fault analysis on the lightweight block cipher PRINTcipher. The authors present two different fault models for obtaining each sub-key. The first fault model is used to obtain the second sub-key, which induces a fault on the key-dependent permutation layer so, on average, key search space is reduced from 2³² to 2¹⁴, given 36 faulty cipher texts. To obtain the first sub-key, the authors induce a fault on an intermediate results then they obtain, on average, 42 bits of the first sub-key with less than 24 faulty cipher texts. In total, on average, they reduce key search space of PRINTcipher from 2⁸⁰ to 2²⁰, given 60 faulty cipher texts. They also simulated their attack on a 1.8 GHz Celeron PC.