Abstract
SIMON is a recent, light-weight block cipher developed by NSA. Previous work on SIMON shows that it is a very promising alternative of AES for resource-constrained platforms. While SIMON offers a range of block sizes and key lengths, a straightforward implementation would select fixed values in order to achieve a compact design. In contrast, we propose a flexible hardware architecture on FPGAs that still preserves the compactness of SIMON. The proposed implementation can execute all configurations of SIMON, and thus provides a versatile architecture that enables adaptive security using a variable key-size. Moreover, it also reduces the inefficiency of encrypting slightly longer messages by supporting a variable block-size. The implementation results show that the proposed architecture occupies 90 and 32 slices on Spartan-3 and Spartan-6 FPGAs, respectively. To our best knowledge, these area results are smaller than other block ciphers of similar security level. Furthermore, we also quantify the cost of flexibility and show the trade-off between the security level, throughput and area.
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This project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant no 1115839.
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Gulcan, E., Aysu, A., Schaumont, P. (2015). A Flexible and Compact Hardware Architecture for the SIMON Block Cipher. In: Eisenbarth, T., Öztürk, E. (eds) Lightweight Cryptography for Security and Privacy. LightSec 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8898. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16363-5_3
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