RPM: Additive Stream Ciphers for Lightweight Communication Security
Giovanni Di Crescenzo, Glenn Veach · 2020
As research of lightweight cryptographic primitives keeps widening, so does the need for different approaches towards rigorous analysis of their properties. In this paper we investigate the use of suitable variations of the ideal cipher analysis methodology to a class of lightweight stream ciphers. Our case study is a suite of lightweight cryptographic techniques proposed in the industry domain to efficiently target communication security while meeting use cases such as interconnected devices working in Low Power Wide Area networks. First of all, we isolate these lightweight techniques as non-linear, additive, stream ciphers. Then, we describe theoretical analysis to support some evidence of plausible security: (a) high-period stream ciphers rule out certain classes of attacks; (b) idealized versions of the analyzed lightweight stream ciphers have high period. Finally, we show empirical performance results, demonstrating effective cipher methods that easily fit into the limited resources of constrained environments, while outperforming state-of-the-art methods in unconstrained environments (e.g., the AES block cipher) by almost one order of magnitude.