Differential Fault Attack of Lightweight Cipher GIFT Based on Byte Model

GIFT, as a lightweight block cipher algorithm, is mainly suitable for resource-constrained environments, such as the Internet of Things, to achieve efficient cryptographic communication. For the diffusion characteristics of round function of GIFT algorithm, this paper proposes two byte-based differential fault attack models. Theoretically, the first and second models require 53.44 and 12.42 byte faults to recover the master key. Experimental results show that the first and second models require about 79 and 16 byte faults, respectively, to recover the master key. The models proposed in this paper have made significant breakthroughs in terms of both the attack range and the number of required faults, which provide important guidance for algorithmic security research and the design of fault-tolerant mechanisms for IoT devices.