Consecutive S-box lookups: A timing attack on SNOW 3G

We present a cache-timing attack on the SNOW 3G stream cipher. The attack has extremely low complexity and we show it is capable of recovering the full cipher state from empirical timing data in a matter of seconds, requiring no known keystream and only observation of a small number of cipher clocks. The attack exploits the cipher using the output from an S-box as input to another S-box: we show that the corresponding cache-timing data almost uniquely determines said S-box input. We mention other ciphers with similar structure where this attack applies, such as the K2 cipher currently under standardization consideration by ISO. Our results yield new insights into the secure design and implementation of ciphers with respect to side-channels. We also give results of a bit-slice implementation as a countermeasure.