Implementation Techniques for GIFT Block Cypher: A Real-Time Performance Comparison

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography is gaining popularity for securing private and sensitive data collected by smart IoT devices. It provides security solutions tailored for constrained devices with the low area, low power and low latency requirements. The PRESENT is one of the most popular block cyphers that are efficient in hardware and offer an optimum level of security. However, the PRESENT cypher does not provide much security against the linear cryptanalytic attack. These security concerns have been addressed through the design of the GIFT block cypher that makes an appropriate choice and efficient use of lighter s-box and bit-permutations, thereby making the overall design more secure and hardware efficient than the PRESENT block cypher. However, the realisation of the linear layer by the bit-permutation method makes the GIFT cypher inefficient in software. This paper describes the software-efficient lookup table, bit-slicing and fix-slicing implementation techniques for the GIFT block cypher. These techniques have been simulated in KEIL MDK IDE and implemented on the ARM Cortex-M3-based LPC1768 hardware platform. Performance comparison of these techniques has been carried out using ULINKpro and ULINKplus debug adapters in terms of various metrics such as power, energy, execution time and memory code size.