Paper 2014/947

The SIMON and SPECK Block Ciphers on AVR 8-bit Microcontrollers

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

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.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Secret-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Lightweight Cryptography for Security and Privacy, Third International Workshop, LightSec 2014
Keywords
simonspeckblock cipherlightweightmicrocontrollerAVR
Contact author(s)
jksmit3 @ tycho ncsc mil
History
2014-11-19: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/947
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/947,
      author = {Ray Beaulieu and Douglas Shors and Jason Smith and Stefan Treatman-Clark and Bryan Weeks and Louis Wingers},
      title = {The SIMON and SPECK Block Ciphers on AVR 8-bit Microcontrollers},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2014/947},
      year = {2014},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/947}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/947}
}
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