International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 19 November 2014

Ray Beaulieu, Douglas Shors, Jason Smith, Stefan Treatman-Clark, Bryan Weeks, Louis Wingers
ePrint Report ePrint Report
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.

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