Lightweight Diffusion Layer from the kth root of the MDS Matrix

The Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) mapping, used in cryptography deploys complex Galois field multiplications, which consume lots of area in hardware, making it a costly primitive for lightweight cryptography. Recently in lightweight hash function: PHOTON, a matrix denoted as ‘Serial’, which required less area for multiplication, has been multiplied 4 times to achieve a lightweight MDS mapping. But no efficient method has been proposed so far to synthesize such a serial matrix or to find the required number of repetitive multiplications needed to be performed for a given MDS mapping. In this paper, first we provide an generic algorithm to find out a low-cost matrix, which can be multiplied k times to obtain a given MDS mapping. Further, we optimize the algorithm for using in cryptography and show an explicit case study on the MDS mapping of the hash function PHOTON to obtain the ‘Serial’. The work also presents quite a few results which may be interesting for lightweight implementation.