RECTANGLE: a bit-slice lightweight block cipher suitable for multiple platforms

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new lightweight block cipher named RECTANGLE. The main idea of the design of RECTANGLE is to allow lightweight and fast implementations using bit-slice techniques. RECTANGLE uses an SP-network. The substitution layer consists of 16 4×4 S-boxes in parallel. The permutation layer is composed of 3 rotations. As shown in this paper, RECTANGLE offers great performance in both hardware and software environment, which provides enough flexibility for different application scenario. The following are 3 main advantages of RECTANGLE. First, RECTANGLE is extremely hardware-friendly. For the 80-bit key version, a one-cycle-per-round parallel implementation only needs 1600 gates for a throughput of 246 Kbits/s at 100 kHz clock and an energy efficiency of 3.0 pJ/bit. Second, RECTANGLE achieves a very competitive software speed among the existing lightweight block ciphers due to its bit-slice style. Using 128-bit SSE instructions, a bit-slice implementation of RECTANGLE reaches an average encryption speed of about 3.9 cycles/byte for messages around 3000 bytes. Last but not least, we propose new design criteria for the RECTANGLE S-box. Due to our careful selection of the S-box and the asymmetric design of the permutation layer, RECTANGLE achieves a very good security-performance tradeoff. Our extensive and deep security analysis shows that the highest number of rounds that we can attack, is 18 (out of 25).