International Association
for Cryptologic Research

There is a significant effort in building lightweight cryptographic operations, yet the proposed solutions are typically single-purpose modules that can implement a single functionality. In contrast, we propose BitCryptor, a multi-purpose, bit-serialized compact processor for cryptographic applications on reconfigurable hardware. The proposed crypto engine can perform pseudo-random number generation, strong collision-resistant hashing and variable-key block cipher encryption. The hardware architecture utilizes SIMON, a recent lightweight block cipher, as its core. The complete engine uses a bit-serial design methodology to minimize the area. Implementation results on the Xilinx Spartan-3 s50 FPGA show that the proposed architecture occupies 95 slices (187 LUTs, 102 registers), which is 10$\\times$ smaller than the nearest comparable multi-purpose design. BitCryptor is also smaller than the majority of recently proposed lightweight single-purpose designs. Therefore, it is a very efficient cryptographic IP block for resource-constrained domains, providing a good performance at a minimal area overhead.