Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/947

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

Ray Beaulieu and Douglas Shors and Jason Smith and Stefan Treatman-Clark and 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.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / simon, speck, block cipher, lightweight, microcontroller, AVR

Original Publication (in the same form): Lightweight Cryptography for Security and Privacy, Third International Workshop, LightSec 2014

Date: received 18 Nov 2014

Contact author: jksmit3 at tycho ncsc mil

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20141119:111320 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2014/947

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