IACR News item: 19 November 2014
Ray Beaulieu, Douglas Shors, Jason Smith, Stefan Treatman-Clark, Bryan Weeks, Louis Wingers
ePrint Reportlightweight 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.
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