Small Footprint Mix-Column Serial for PHOTON and LED Lightweight Cryptography

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography such as PHOTON or LED has a transform named as Mix-Column-Serial (MCS). Within the MCS, matrix manipulations use Galois polynomial multiplications that require lengthy steps of logical operations. This paper proposes the use of a look-up table with comparators to replace the lengthy steps. As PHOTON’s Galois matrix multiplication produces identical results for pairs of column-row and row-columns, with comparators, the table size is reduced to half. The tables and comparators have been implemented on FPGAs. FPGA’s synthesized results of the newly proposed MCS in the form table with comparators are superior in terms of throughput and area compared to other MCS hardware implementations found in literatures.