International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Owing to the growing demand for lightweight cryptographic solutions, NIST has initiated a standardization process for lightweight cryptographic algorithms. Specific to authenticated encryption (AE), the NIST draft demands that the scheme should have one primary member that has key length of 128 bits, and it should be secure for at least 250 − 1 byte queries and 2112 computations. Popular (lightweight) modes, such as OCB, OTR, CLOC, SILC, JAMBU, COFB, SAEB, Beetle, SUNDAE etc., require at least 128-bit primitives to meet the NIST criteria, as all of them are just birthday bound secure. Furthermore, most of them are sequential, and they either use a two pass mode or they do not offer any security when the adversary has access to unverified plaintext (RUP model). In this paper, we propose two new designs for lightweight AE modes, called LOCUS and LOTUS, structurally similar to OCB and OTR, respectively. These modes achieve notably higher AE security bounds with lighter primitives (only a 64-bit tweakable block cipher). Especially, they satisfy the NIST requirements: secure as long as the data complexity is less than 264 bytes and time complexity is less than 2128, even when instantiated with a primitive with 64-bit block and 128-bit key. Both these modes are fully parallelizable and provide full integrity security under the RUP model. We use TweGIFT-64[4,16,16,4] (also referred as TweGIFT-64), a tweakable variant of the GIFT block cipher, to instantiate our AE modes. TweGIFT-64-LOCUS and TweGIFT-64-LOTUS are significantly light in hardware implementation. To justify, we provide our FPGA based implementation results, which demonstrate that TweGIFT-64-LOCUS consumes only 257 slices and 690 LUTs, while TweGIFT-64-LOTUS consumes only 255 slices and 664 LUTs.

NIST has recently initiated a standardization project for efficient lightweight authenticated encryption schemes. SUNDAE, a candidate in this project, achieves optimal state size which results in low circuit overhead on top of the underlying block cipher. In addition, SUNDAE provides security in nonce-misuse scenario as well. However, in addition to the block cipher circuit, SUNDAE also requires some additional circuitry for multiplication by a primitive element. Further, it requires an additional block cipher invocation to create the starting state. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight and low energy authenticated encryption family, called ESTATE, that significantly improves the design of SUNDAE in terms of implementation costs (both hardware area and energy) and efficient processing of short messages. In particular, ESTATE does not require an additional multiplication circuit, and it reduces the number of block cipher calls by one. Moreover, it provides integrity security even under the release of unverified plaintext (or RUP) model. ESTATE is based on short-tweak tweakable block ciphers (or tBC, small ’t’ denotes short tweaks) and we instantiate it with two recently designed tBCs: TweAES and TweGIFT. We also propose a low latency variant of ESTATE, called sESTATE, that uses a round-reduced (6 rounds) variant of TweAES called TweAES-6. We provide comprehensive FPGA based hardware implementation for all the three instances. The implementation results depict that ESTATE_TweGIFT-128 (681 LUTs, 263 slices) consumes much lesser area as compared to SUNDAE_GIFT-128 (931 LUTs, 310 slices). When we moved to the AES variants, along with the area-efficiency (ESTATE_TweAES consumes 1901 LUTs, 602 slices while SUNDAE_AES-128 needs 1922 LUTs, 614 slices), we also achieve higher throughput for short messages (For 16-byte message, a throughput of 1251.10 and 945.36 Mbps for ESTATE_TweAES and SUNDAE_AES-128 respectively).