Tamper Resistance Evaluation of TWINE Implemented on 8-bit Microcontroller

Abstract

Lightweight ciphers, which can be used in limited resources of internet of things devices, have been attracted attention in recent years. In particular, TWINE has good performances in software implementation of a small embedded device. Even though encryption algorithm is computationally secured, the threat of power analysis which can easily estimate a secret key stored into a cryptographic circuit is pointed out. This study proposes a power analysis method for a lightweight cipher TWINE of software implementation to evaluate the tamper resistance (security evaluation). The proposed method introduces two attack points which are obtained by an analysis of assembly code of TWINE round function. Evaluation experiments use an AVR 8-bit microcontroller Atmega328P mounted on Arduino-UNO. These experiments revealed the vulnerability of TWINE software implementation against the proposed power analysis method.