Flexible and Lightweight Cryptographic Engines for Constrained Systems

Abstract

There is a significant effort in building lightweight cryptographic operations, yet the proposed solutions are typically single purpose modules that can only provide a fixed functionality. However, flexibility is an important aspect of cryptographic designs where a module can perform multiple operations with different configurations. In this work, we combine flexibility with lightweight designs and propose two cryptographic engines based on the SIMON block cipher. The first proposed engine is the Flexible SIMON, which can execute all configurations of SIMON thus enables an adaptive security with variable key sizes. Our second proposed implementation is BitCryptor, a bit-serialized Compact Crypto Engine that can perform symmetric key encryption, hash computation and pseudo-random-number-generation. The implementation results on a Spartan-3 s50 FPGA show that the proposed engines occupies 90 and 95 slices respectively, which are more compact than the majority of their single purpose counterparts. Therefore, these engines are suitable cryptographic blocks for resource-constrained systems.