International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a new block cipher LED. While dedicated to compact hardware implementation, and offering the smallest silicon footprint among comparable block ciphers, the cipher has been designed to simultaneously tackle three additional goals.

First, we explore the role of an ultra-light (in fact non-existent) key schedule. Second, we consider the resistance of ciphers, and LED in particular, to related-key attacks: we are able to derive simple yet interesting AES-like security proofs for LED regarding related- or single-key attacks. And third, while we provide a block cipher that is very compact in hardware, we aim to maintain a reasonable performance profile for software implementation.