Abstract
The processing time required by a cryptographic primitive implemented in hardware is an important metric for its performance but it has not received much attention in recent publications on lightweight cryptography. Nevertheless, there are important applications for cost effective low-latency encryption. As the first step in the field, this paper explores the low-latency behavior of hardware implementations of a set of block ciphers. The latency of the implementations is investigated as well as the trade-offs with other metrics such as circuit area, time-area product, power, and energy consumption. The obtained results are related back to the properties of the underlying cipher algorithm and, as it turns out, the number of rounds, their complexity, and the similarity of encryption and decryption procedures have a strong impact on the results. We provide a qualitative description and conclude with a set of recommendations for aspiring low-latency block cipher designers.
The authors would like to thank Bruce Murray for his valuable comments and suggestions to improve the work. The authors also thank Hans De Kuyper for his valuable inputs. The work has been supported by the European Commission through the ICT program under contract ICT-2007-216646 (European Network of Excellence in Cryptology – ECRYPT II), through the Tamper Resistant Sensor Node (TAMPRES) project with contract number 258754 and through the Internet of Things - Architecture (IoT-A) project with contract number 257521.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
FIPS Pub. 197: Specification for the AES (November 2001), http://csrc.nist.gov/pub-lications/fips/fips197/fips-197.pdf
Biryukov, A. (ed.): FSE 2007. LNCS, vol. 4593. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Robshaw, M., Billet, O. (eds.): New Stream Cipher Designs. LNCS, vol. 4986. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Mangard, S., Standaert, F.-X. (eds.): CHES 2010. LNCS, vol. 6225. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Preneel, B., Takagi, T. (eds.): CHES 2011. LNCS, vol. 6917. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Aumasson, J.-P., Henzenz, L., Meier, W., Naya-Plasencia, M.: Quark: a lightweight hash. In: Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems — CHES 2010 [4], pp. 1–15
Bertoni, G., Daemen, J., Peeters, M., Assche, G.V.: Keccak sponge function family main document (version 2.1). Submission to NIST (2010), http://keccak.noekeon.org/Keccak-main-2.1.pdf
Bogdanov, A., Knežević, M., Leander, G., Toz, D., Varici, K., Verbauwhede, I.: SPONGENT: A lightweight hash function. In: Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems — CHES 2011 [5], pp. 312–325
Bogdanov, A., Knudsen, L.R., Leander, G., Paar, C., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M.J.B., Seurin, Y., Vikkelsoe, C.: PRESENT: An Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher. In: Paillier, P., Verbauwhede, I. (eds.) CHES 2007. LNCS, vol. 4727, pp. 450–466. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
De Cannière, C., Dunkelman, O., Knežević, M.: KATAN and KTANTAN — A Family of Small and Efficient Hardware-Oriented Block Ciphers. In: Clavier, C., Gaj, K. (eds.) CHES 2009. LNCS, vol. 5747, pp. 272–288. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Cannière, C.D., Preneel, B.: Trivium. In: The eSTREAM Finalists [3], pp. 244–266
Cid, C., Murphy, S., Robshaw, M.J.B.: Small Scale Variants of the AES. In: Gilbert, H., Handschuh, H. (eds.) FSE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3557, pp. 145–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Daemen, J., Peeters, M., Rijmen, V., Assehe, G.V.: Nessie Proposal: Noekeon (2000), http://gro.noekeon.org/
Daemen, J., Rijmen, V.: The Design of Rijndael: AES - The Advanced Encryption Standard. Springer (2002)
European Network of Excellence in Cryptology – ECRYPT. The eSTREAM Project (2004), http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/
Feldhofer, M., Rechberger, C.: A Case Against Currently Used Hash Functions in RFID Protocols. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z., Herrero, P. (eds.) OTM 2006 Workshops, Part I. LNCS, vol. 4277, pp. 372–381. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Feldhofer, M., Wolkerstorfer, J., Rijmen, V.: AES Implementation on a Grain of Sand. IEE Proceedings Information Security 152(1), 13–20 (2005)
Gong, Z., Nikova, S., Law, Y.W.: KLEIN: A New Family of Lightweight Block Ciphers. In: Juels, A., Paar, C. (eds.) RFIDSec 2011. LNCS, vol. 7055, pp. 1–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Guo, J., Peyrin, T., Poschmann, A.: The PHOTON Family of Lightweight Hash Functions. In: Rogaway, P. (ed.) CRYPTO 2011. LNCS, vol. 6841, pp. 222–239. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Guo, J., Peyrin, T., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M.: The LED Block Cipher. In: Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems — CHES 2011 [5], pp. 326–341
Hell, M., Johansson, T., Maximov, A., Meier, W.: The Grain Family of Stream Ciphers. In: The eSTREAM Finalists [3], pp. 179–190
Hodjat, A., Verbauwhede, I.: Area-Throughput Trade-offs for Fully Pipelined 30 to 70 Gbits/s AES Processors. IEEE Transactions on Computers 55(4), 366–372 (2006)
Hong, D., Sung, J., Hong, S., Lim, J., Lee, S., Koo, B., Lee, C., Chang, D., Lee, J., Jeong, K., Kim, H., Kim, J., Chee, S.: HIGHT: A New Block Cipher Suitable for Low-Resource Device. In: Goubin, L., Matsui, M. (eds.) CHES 2006. LNCS, vol. 4249, pp. 46–59. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Izadi, M., Sadeghiyan, B., Sadeghian, S., Khanooki, H.: MIBS: A New Lightweight Block Cipher. In: Garay, J.A., Miyaji, A., Otsuka, A. (eds.) CANS 2009. LNCS, vol. 5888, pp. 334–348. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Kavun, E., Yalcin, T.: A Lightweight Implementation of Keccak Hash Function for Radio-Frequency Identification Applications. In: Ors Yalcin, S.B. (ed.) RFIDSec 2010. LNCS, vol. 6370, pp. 258–269. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Knudsen, L., Leander, G., Poschmann, A., Robshaw, M.: PRINTcipher: A Block Cipher for IC-Printing. In: Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems — CHES 2010 [4], pp. 16–32
Leander, G., Paar, C., Poschmann, A., Schramm, K.: New Lightweight DES Variants. In: 14th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption — FSE 2007 [2], pp. 196–210
Leander, G., Poschmann, A.: On the Classification of 4 Bit S-Boxes. In: Carlet, C., Sunar, B. (eds.) WAIFI 2007. LNCS, vol. 4547, pp. 159–176. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Lim, C., Korkishko, T.: mCrypton – A Lightweight Block Cipher for Security of Low-Cost RFID Tags and Sensors. In: Song, J.-S., Kwon, T., Yung, M. (eds.) WISA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3786, pp. 243–258. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Mathew, S., Sheikh, F., Kounavis, M., Gueron, S., Agarwal, A., Hsu, S., Kaul, H., Anders, M., Krishnamurthy, R.: 53 Gbps Native GF(24)2 Composite-Field AES-Encrypt/Decrypt Accelerator for Content-Protection in 45 nm High-Performance Microprocessors. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 46(4), 767–776 (2011)
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition, http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/index.html
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). FIPS 197: Advanced Encryption Standard (November 2001)
Poschmann, A., Moradi, A., Khoo, K., Lim, C.-W., Wang, H., Ling, S.: Side-Channel Resistant Crypto for Less than 2,300 GE. Journal of Cryptology 24, 322–345 (2011)
Shibutani, K., Isobe, T., Hiwatari, H., Mitsuda, A., Akishita, T., Shirai, T.: Piccolo: An Ultra-Lightweight Blockcipher. In: Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems — CHES 2011 [5], pp. 342–357
Shirai, T., Shibutani, K., Akishita, T., Moriai, S., Iwata, T.: The 128-bit blockcipher CLEFIA. In: 14th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption — FSE 2007 [2], pp. 181–195
Standaert, F.-X., Piret, G., Gershenfeld, N., Quisquater, J.-J.: SEA: A Scalable Encryption Algorithm for Small Embedded Applications. In: Domingo-Ferrer, J., Posegga, J., Schreckling, D. (eds.) CARDIS 2006. LNCS, vol. 3928, pp. 222–236. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Wheeler, D., Needham, R.: TEA, a Tiny Encryption Algorithm. In: Preneel, B. (ed.) FSE 1994. LNCS, vol. 1008, pp. 363–366. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 International Association for Cryptologic Research
About this paper
Cite this paper
Knežević, M., Nikov, V., Rombouts, P. (2012). Low-Latency Encryption – Is “Lightweight = Light + Wait”?. In: Prouff, E., Schaumont, P. (eds) Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems – CHES 2012. CHES 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7428. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33027-8_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33027-8_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33026-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33027-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)