Breaking Speck cryptosystem using correlation power analysis attack

This is an empirical study based on correlation power analysis for extracting the secret key from a Speck based embedded cryptosystem. Speck was recently introduced by the National Security Agency, USA as a lightweight softwarebased block cipher targetting embedded systems. The pervasive nature of embedded devices makes it crucial to perform this assessment. We empirically show that the secret key of a Speck cryptosystem can be extracted within an hour on a microcontroller based embedded system. The experiments were performed in three different microcontrollers with different bit widths and power settings. It is concluded that although Speck is new, it is vulnerable to power analysis attack.