Electromagnetic Side-Channel Resilience against Lightweight Cryptography

Side-channel attacks are an unpredictable risk factor in cryptography. Therefore, observations of leakages through physical parameters, i.e., power and electromagnetic (EM) radiation, etc., of digital devices are essential to minimise vulnerabilities associated with cryptographic functions. Compared to costs in the past, performing side-channel attacks using inexpensive test equipment is becoming a reality. Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are resource-constrained, and lightweight cryptography is a novel approach in progress towards IoT security. Thus, it would provide sufficient data and privacy protection in such a constrained ecosystem. Therefore, cryptanalysis of physical leakages regarding these emerging ciphers is crucial. EM side-channel attacks seem to cause a significant impact on digital forensics nowadays. Within existing literature, power analysis seems to have considerable attention in research whereas other phenomena, such as EM, should continue to be appropriately evaluated in playing a role in forensic analysis.The emphasis of this thesis is on lightweight cryptanalysis. The preliminary investigations showed no Correlation EManalysis (CEMA) of PRESENT lightweight algorithm. The PRESENT is a block cipher that promises to be adequate for IoT devices, and is expected to be used commercially in the future. In an effort to fill in this research gap, this work examines the capabilities of a correlation EM side-channel attack against the PRESENT. For that, Substitution box (S-box) of the PRESENT was targeted for its 1st round with the use of a minimum number of EM waveforms compared to other work in literature, which was 256. The attack indicates the possibility of retrieving 8 bytes of the secret key out of 10 bytes. The experimental process started from a Simple EMA (SEMA) and gradually enhanced up to a CEMA. The thesis presents the methodology of the attack modelling and the observations followed by a critical analysis. Also, a technical review of the IoT technology and a comprehensive literature review on lightweight cryptology are included

Next generation lightweight cryptography for smart IoT devices: Implementation, challenges and applications

High/ultra-high speed data connections are currently being developed, and by the year 2020, it is expected that the 5th generation networking (5GN) should be much smarter. It would provide great quality of service (QoS) due to low latency, less implementation cost and high efficiency in data processing. These networks could be either a point-to-point (P2P) communication link or a point-to-multipoint (P2M) communication link, which, P2M is also known as multi-casting that addresses multiple subscribers. The P2M systems usually have diverse nodes (also called as `Things') according to services and levels of security required. These nodes need an uninterrupted network inter-connectivity as well as a cloud platform to manage data sharing and storage. However, the Internet of Things (IoT), with real-time applications like in smart cities, wearable gadgets, medical, military, connected driver-less cars, etc., includes massive data processing and transmission. Nevertheless, integrated circuits (ICs) deployed in IoT based infrastructures have strong constraints in terms of size, cost, power consumption and security. Concerning the last aspect, the main challenges identified so far are resilience of the deployed infrastructure, confidentiality, integrity of exchanged data, user privacy and authenticity. Therefore, well secured and effective cryptographic algorithms are needed that cause small hardware footprints, i.e. Lightweight Cryptography (LWC), also with the provision of robustness, long range transfer of encrypted data and acceptable level of security.In this paper, the implementation, challenges and futuristic applications of LWC algorithms for smart IoT devices have been discussed, especially the performance of Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) which is an open standard that defines the communication protocol for Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology