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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

The Simon and Speck Block Ciphers on AVR 8-Bit Microcontrollers

Authors : Ray Beaulieu, Douglas Shors, Jason Smith, Stefan Treatman-Clark, Bryan Weeks, Louis Wingers

Published in: Lightweight Cryptography for Security and Privacy

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The last several years have witnessed a surge of activity in lightweight cryptographic design. Many lightweight block ciphers have been proposed, targeted mostly at hardware applications. Typically software performance has not been a priority, and consequently software performance for many of these algorithms is unexceptional. Simon and Speck are lightweight block cipher families developed by the U.S. National Security Agency for high performance in constrained hardware and software environments. In this paper, we discuss software performance and demonstrate how to achieve high performance implementations of Simon and Speck on the AVR family of 8-bit microcontrollers. Both ciphers compare favorably to other lightweight block ciphers on this platform. Indeed, Speck seems to have better overall performance than any existing block cipher — lightweight or not.

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next chapter The Multiplicative Complexity of Boolean Functions on Four and Five Variables
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Simon 64/96 and Speck 64/96, for example, have implementations requiring just 809 and 860 gate equivalents, respectively. Some block ciphers, like KTANTAN [9], have a fixed key and so do not require flip-flops to store it. Such algorithms can have smaller hardware implementations than Simon or Speck, but not allowing keys to change contracts the application space, and can lead to security issues [22].
 
2
This is because one is likely to use encrypt-only modes in lightweight cryptography. But the techniques discussed here should serve as a starting point for other kinds of implementations, useful for a broad range of applications. Regarding decryption functionality, we note that the Simon and Speck encryption and decryption algorithms consume similar resources and are easy to implement. Simon, in particular, has a decryption algorithm that is closely related to the encryption algorithm, and so little additional code is necessary to enable decryption.
 
3
The Simon and Speck specification paper [2] did not count these cycles required for loading, although it seems proper to do so. The current performance numbers include these costs.
 
4
This rotation is also easily implemented (but not for free) on some common 16-bit microcontrollers, like the MSP430, and using x86 SSE instructions (where no rotate is available but a byte permutation operation is).
 
5
We do not know, for a fact, that the high-speed AES implementations, which require frequent calls to RAM, are more energy efficient than the high-speed Speck implementations which use mostly register-to-register operations.
 
6
No data for the other finalist, Rabbit [5], was available.
 
7
The rank is similar to the metric found in [21] except we have imposed a penalty for using too much RAM — hence the factor of 2. Without the factor of 2, flash and RAM have the same cost, which seems unjustifiable.
 
8
The HC-128 stream cipher implementation does not actually fit on the ATmega128 due to its excessive use of RAM. The C implementation of HC-128 described in [17] has a setup cost of over 2,000,000 cycles.
 
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Metadata
Title
The Simon and Speck Block Ciphers on AVR 8-Bit Microcontrollers
Authors
Ray Beaulieu
Douglas Shors
Jason Smith
Stefan Treatman-Clark
Bryan Weeks
Louis Wingers
Copyright Year
2015
Book
Lightweight Cryptography for Security and Privacy

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16362-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-16363-5

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16363-5_1

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