International Association
for Cryptologic Research

PRINCE is a new lightweight block cipher proposed at the ASIACRYPT\'2012 conference. In this paper two observations on the linear layer of the cipher are presented. Based on the observations a differential fault attack is applied to the cipher under a random nibble-level fault model. The attack uniquely determines the 128-bit key of the cipher using less than 7 fault injections averagely. In the case with 4 fault injections, the attack limits the key to a space of size less than $2^{18}$ statistically.