Double sieve collision attack based on bitwise detection

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is widely used for protecting wireless sensor network (WSN). At the Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2012, Gérard et al. proposed an optimized collision attack and break a practical implementation of AES. However, the attack needs at least 256 averaged power traces and has a high computational complexity because of its byte wise operation. In this paper, we propose a novel double sieve collision attack based on bitwise collision detection, and an improved version with an error-tolerant mechanism. Practical attacks are successfully conducted on a software implementation of AES in a low-power chip which can be used in wireless sensor node. Simulation results show that our attack needs 90% less time than the work published by Gérard et al. to reach a success rate of 0.9.