International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We introduce the Sparkle family of permutations operating on 256, 384 and 512 bits. These are combined with the Beetle mode to construct a family of authenticated ciphers, Schwaemm, with security levels ranging from 120 to 250 bits. We also use them to build new sponge-based hash functions, Esch256 and Esch384. Our permutations are among those with the lowest footprint in software, without sacrificing throughput. These properties are allowed by our use of an ARX component (the Alzette S-box) as well as a carefully chosen number of rounds. The corresponding analysis is enabled by the long trail strategy which gives us the tools we need to efficiently bound the probability of all the differential and linear trails for an arbitrary number of rounds. We also present a new application of this approach where the only trails considered are those mapping the rate to the outer part of the internal state, such trails being the only relevant trails for instance in a differential collision attack. To further decrease the number of rounds without compromising security, we modify the message injection in the classical sponge construction to break the alignment between the rate and our S-box layer.

S-boxes are the only source of non-linearity in many symmetric cryptographic primitives. While they are often defined as being functions operating on a small space, some recent designs propose the use of much larger ones (e.g., 32 bits). In this context, an S-box is then defined as a subfunction whose cryptographic properties can be estimated precisely. In this paper, we present a 64-bit ARX-based S-box called Alzette which can be evaluated in constant time using only 12 instructions on modern CPUs. Its parallel application can also leverage vector (SIMD) instructions. One iteration of Alzette has differential and linear properties comparable to those of the AES S-box, while two iterations are at least as secure as the AES super S-box. Since the state size is much larger than the typical 4 or 8 bits, the study of the relevant cryptographic properties of Alzette is not trivial. We further discuss how such wide S-boxes could be used to construct round functions of 64-, 128- and 256-bit (tweakable) block ciphers with good cryptographic properties that are guaranteed even in the related-tweak setting. We use these structures to design a very lightweight 64-bit block cipher (CRAX) which outerperforms SPECK-64/128 for short messages on micro-controllers, and a 256-bit tweakable block cipher (TRAX) which can be used to obtain strong security guarantees against powerful adversaries (nonce misuse, quantum attacks).