BitCryptor: bit-serialized flexible crypto engine for lightweight applications. (English) Zbl 1377.94052

Gulcan, Ege; Aysu, Aydin; Schaumont, Patrick

Biryukov, Alex (ed.) et al., Progress in cryptology – INDOCRYPT 2015. 16th international conference on cryptology in India, Bangalore, India, December 6–9, 2015. Proceedings. Cham: Springer (ISBN 978-3-319-26616-9/pbk; 978-3-319-26617-6/ebook). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9462, 329-346 (2015).

Summary: There is a significant effort in building lightweight cryptographic operations, yet the proposed solutions are typically single-purpose modules that can implement a single functionality. In contrast, we propose BitCryptor, a multi-purpose, compact processor for cryptographic applications on reconfigurable hardware. The proposed crypto engine can perform pseudo-random number

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generation, strong collision-resistant hashing and variable-key block cipher encryption. The hardware architecture utilizes SIMON, a recent lightweight block cipher, as its core. The complete engine uses a bit-serial design methodology to minimize the area. Implementation results on the Xilinx Spartan-3 s50 FPGA show that the proposed architecture occupies 95 slices (187 LUTs, 102 registers), which is \(10 \times \) smaller than the nearest comparable multi-purpose design. BitCryptor is also smaller than the majority of recently proposed lightweight single-purpose designs. Therefore, it is a very efficient cryptographic IP block for resource-constrained domains, providing a good performance at a minimal area overhead.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1326.94005].

MSC:

94A60	Cryptography
68P25	Data encryption (aspects in computer science)

Keywords:

lightweight cryptography; bit-serialization; hardware architecture; crypto engine; SIMON; FPGA

Software:

CLEFIA; PRESENT; BitCryptor; SIMON; Camellia