Correlation Power Analysis on Ascon with Multi-Bit Selection Function

Viet Sang Nguyen, Vincent Grosso, Pierre-Louis Cayrel

2025

Abstract

Ascon has recently been selected by NIST as the new standard for lightweight cryptography. This highlights the need to evaluate its resilience against implementation attacks such as Correlation Power Analysis (CPA). Traditional CPA on Ascon uses a 1-bit selection function, modeling power consumption based on a single bit of an machine word. However, actual power leakage depends on the entire word. Therefore, the hypothesized power consumption aligns better with the measured values when more bits of the word are involved in the selection function. This paper investigates the use of multi-bit selection functions in CPA on Ascon. We show that the bitsliced-oriented design of Ascon leads the multi-bit selection functions to produce a group of key candidates with high correlations, rather than a single candidate as typically expected in CPA. Through theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we examine this behavior in detail. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient key recovery algorithm tailored for the multi-bit selection functions. Our results demonstrate that this approach significantly reduces the number of CPA runs required for full key recovery.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Nguyen V., Grosso V. and Cayrel P. (2025). Correlation Power Analysis on Ascon with Multi-Bit Selection Function. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-760-3, SciTePress, pages 72-83. DOI: 10.5220/0013460000003979

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt25,
author={Viet Sang Nguyen and Vincent Grosso and Pierre-Louis Cayrel},
title={Correlation Power Analysis on Ascon with Multi-Bit Selection Function},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2025},
pages={72-83},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013460000003979},
isbn={978-989-758-760-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - Correlation Power Analysis on Ascon with Multi-Bit Selection Function
SN - 978-989-758-760-3
AU - Nguyen V.
AU - Grosso V.
AU - Cayrel P.
PY - 2025
SP - 72
EP - 83
DO - 10.5220/0013460000003979
PB - SciTePress