A comprehensive study of algebraic fault analysis on PRINCE

PRINCE is a 64-bit lightweight block cipher with a 128-bit key published at ASIACRYPT 2012. Assuming one nibble fault is injected, previous different fault analysis (DFA) on PRINCE adopted the technique from DFA on AES and current results are different. This paper aims to make a comprehensive study of algebraic fault analysis (AFA) on PRINCE. How to build the equations for PRINCE and faults are explained. Extensive experiments are conducted. Under nibble-based fault model, AFA with three or four fault injections can succeed within 300 seconds with a very high probability. Under other fault models such as byte-based, half word-based, word-based fault models, the faults become overlapped in the last round and previous DFAs are difficult to work. Our results show that AFA can still succeed to recover the full master key. To evaluate security of PRINCE against fault attacks, we utilize AFA to calculate the reduced entropy of the secret key for given amount of fault injections. The results can interpret and compare the efficiency of previous work. Under nibble-based fault model, the master key of PRINCE can be reduced to 2^9.69 and 2^36.10 with 3 and 2 fault injections on average, respectively.