A Micro-Controller Implementation of a Fialka M-125 Based Stream Cipher

In 2013, a new stream cipher was proposed in Antal, E.-Hromada, V.: A new stream cipher based on Fialka M-125, Tatra Mt. Math. Publ. 57 (2013), 101-118. Its design was inspired and motivated by a Soviet encryption machine Fialka M-125. The authors proposed three versions of the cipher with different inner state bit-lengths. They provided the design, software implementation on a personal computer and a preliminary statistical and performance analysis of the cipher.

In this article we extend their work by implementing all three versions of the cipher on two different micro-controllers: EBV SoCrates evaluation board [Official SoCrates webpage (EBV SoCrates evaluation board), www.rockerboards.org] and STM32F407VG [Official STM webpage (STM32F407VG), www.st.com]. We evaluate the performance of all implementations on both platforms. We also investigate the possibilities of performing a simple power analysis of the implementation of the 8-bit version of the cipher implemented on STM32F407VG micro-controller. It stems from our experiments that we are able to determine a part of the secret key of the cipher by observing the power trace (power consumption) of the encryption/decryption process