• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.807-816
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• 2022

See-In-The-Middle (SITM) is an analysis technique that uses Side-Channel information for differential cryptanalysis. This attack collects unmasked middle-round power traces when implementing block ciphers to select plaintext pairs that satisfy the attacker's differential pattern and utilize them for differential cryptanalysis to recover the key. Romulus, one of the final candidates for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization competition, is based on Tweakable block cipher Skinny-128-384+. In this paper, the SITM attack is applied to Skinny-128-384 implemented with 14-round partial masking. This attack not only increased depth by one round, but also significantly reduced the time/data complexity to 2^14.93/2^14.93. Depth refers to the round position of the block cipher that collects the power trace, and it is possible to measure the appropriate number of masking rounds required when applying the masking technique to counter this attack. Furthermore, we extend the attack to Romulus's Nonce-based AE mode Romulus-N, and Tweakey's structural features show that it can attack with less complexity than Skinny-128-384.