New Differential Fault Attack on Lightweight Cipher LBlock

LBlock is a lightweight block cipher designed for tiny computing devices, such as RFID tags and sensor network nodes. The cipher algorithm iterates a Feistel structure with SP type round function by 32 rounds. Its block size is 64 bits and key size is 80 bits. The designers show that LBlock is resistant against most classical attacks, such as differential and linear cryptanalysis. This paper proposed a differential fault analysis on LBlock. By injecting faults in the 27th round to the 29th round, a differential fault attack on LBlock based on a nibble-oriented random fault model is presented. The experiment result shows that 4.3 faults on average could recover a round key. For reveal the whole key information, 13.3 faults on average are needed. This indicates that cryptographic devices supporting LBlock should be carefully protected.