SEA: a scalable encryption algorithm for small embedded applications

  • Authors:
  • François-Xavier Standaert;Gilles Piret;Neil Gershenfeld;Jean-Jacques Quisquater

  • Affiliations:
  • UCL Crypto Group, Laboratoire de Microélectronique, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium;Département d'Informatique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France;Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;UCL Crypto Group, Laboratoire de Microélectronique, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • CARDIS'06 Proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 8.8/11.2 international conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Most present symmetric encryption algorithms result from a tradeoff between implementation cost and resulting performances. In addition, they generally aim to be implemented efficiently on a large variety of platforms. In this paper, we take an opposite approach and consider a context where we have very limited processing resources and throughput requirements. For this purpose, we propose low-cost encryption routines (i.e. with small code size and memory) targeted for processors with a limited instruction set (i.e. AND, OR, XOR gates, word rotation and modular addition). The proposed design is parametric in the text, key and processor size, allows efficient combination of encryption/decryption, “on-the-fly” key derivation and its security against a number of recent cryptanalytic techniques is discussed. Target applications for such routines include any context requiring low-cost encryption and/or authentication.