International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 17 September 2015

Adnan Baysal, Suhap Sahin
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Designing block ciphers targeting resource constrained 8-bit

CPUs is a challenging problem. There are many recent lightweight ciphers designed for better performance in hardware. On the other hand, most software efficient lightweight ciphers either lack a security proof or have a low security margin. To fill the gap, we present RoadRunneR which is an efficient block cipher in 8-bit software, and its security is provable against differential and linear attacks. RoadRunneR has lowest code size in Atmel\'s ATtiny45, except NSA\'s design SPECK, which has no security proof. Moreover, we propose a new metric for the fair comparison of block ciphers. This metric, called ST/A, is the first metric to

use key length as a parameter to rank ciphers of different key length in a fair way. By using ST/A and other metrics in the literature, we show that RoadRunneR is competitive among existing ciphers on ATtiny45.

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