Paper 2021/1560
SAND: an AND-RX Feistel lightweight block cipher supporting S-box-based security evaluations
Shiyao Chen and Yanhong Fan and Ling Sun and Yong Fu and Haibo Zhou and Yongqing Li and Meiqin Wang and Weijia Wang and Chun Guo
Abstract
We revisit designing AND-RX block ciphers, that is, the designs assembled with the most fundamental binary operations---AND, Rotation and XOR operations and do not rely on existing units. Likely, the most popular representative is the NSA cipher \texttt{SIMON}, which remains one of the most efficient designs, but suffers from difficulty in security evaluation. As our main contribution, we propose \texttt{SAND}, a new family of lightweight AND-RX block ciphers. To overcome the difficulty regarding security evaluation, \texttt{SAND} follows a novel design approach, the core idea of which is to restrain the AND-RX operations to be within nibbles. By this, \texttt{SAND} admits an equivalent representation based on a $4\times8$ \textit{synthetic S-box} ($SSb$). This enables the use of classical S-box-based security evaluation approaches. Consequently, for all versions of \texttt{SAND}, (a) we evaluated security bounds with respect to differential and linear attacks, and in both single-key and related-key scenarios; (b) we also evaluated security against impossible differential and zero-correlation linear attacks. This better understanding of the security enables the use of a relatively simple key schedule, which makes the ASIC round-based hardware implementation of \texttt{SAND} to be one of the state-of-art Feistel lightweight ciphers. As to software performance, due to the natural bitslice structure, \texttt{SAND} reaches the same level of performance as \texttt{SIMON} and is among the most software-efficient block ciphers.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- Category
- Secret-key cryptography
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Design, Codes and Cryptography 2021
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10623-021-00970-9
- Keywords
- Lightweight cryptographyFeistel structureAND-Rotation-XORSynthetic S-boxRelated-key security
- Contact author(s)
- mqwang @ sdu edu cn,sychen @ mail sdu edu cn
- History
- 2021-11-29: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2021/1560
- License
-
CC BY