Differential power analysis attack and countermeasures on MCrypton

MCrypton is an ultra-lightweight symmetric cryptographic algorithm, which is designed to adapt to the resource constrained computing scenarios, such as RFID tags and sensor networks, etc. With the continuous development of Internet of things (IoT), the application of this kind algorithm becomes increasingly popular, so the implementation security of the algorithm has correspondingly become an imperative research area. Among the attack methods, the power consumption attack (PA) is widely adopted because of its advantages such as easy acquisition, fast efficiency and high accuracy. This paper has designed a complete differential power attack (DPA) platform, targeting at the mCrypton algorithm implemented on a Mega16 micro-controller. Test results indication that the mCrypton algorithm is vulnerable to power consumption attack under the current hardware environment. Also, to resist these attacks, the present paper proposes a fixed-value mask algorithm for mCrypton.