SFN: A new lightweight block cipher

Abstract

During past few years, some lightweight block ciphers have been proposed. These lightweight block ciphers take single encryption method that either uses Substitution-Permutation (SP) network structure or Feistel network structure to encrypt. In this paper, we have designed a different encryption method that takes both SP network structure and Feistel network structure to encrypt. Current SP network has a limitation that the encryption and decryption processes are dissimilar. To solve this problem, we have employed involution related properties of the nonlinear and linear components to modify SP network structure. The modified one enables the encryption and decryption program or circuit to work as the Feistel network structure. Additionally, we have implemented a MixRows in SP network structure. Then we instantiate these three novel ideas into the lightweight block cipher called SFN. We have carried out the security evaluation and the hardware and software experiments to it. The result shows that compared to other lightweight block ciphers, SFN has more advantages in terms of being immune to attacks. Also, SFN is not only compact in hardware environment but also efficient in software platforms.