A CPA Attack against Round Based Piccolo-80 Hardware Implementation

In CHES 2011, Sony Corporation proposed a very promising ultra-lightweight blockcipher named Piccolo and claimed it offers a sufficient security level against known cryptanalyses based on mathematical weaknesses. The correlation power analysis (CPA) attack against a round-based Piccolo-80 hardware implementation is discussed in this paper. We built a power consumption acquisition platform based on simulation for minimum overhead, presented a feasible CPA attack method based on HD model and the final round, and retrieved the final round key RK24L, RK24R, and the whiten key WK2 and WK2 with 500 power traces. The results showed Piccolo-80 round-based hardware implementation is vulnerable to power analysis attack. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to discuss power analysis attack against Piccolo.