Bitsliced Implementations of the PRINCE, LED and RECTANGLE Block Ciphers on AVR 8-Bit Microcontrollers

Due to the demand for low-cost cryptosystems from industry, there spring up a lot of lightweight block ciphers which are excellent for some different implementation features. An innovative design is the block cipher PRINCE. To meet the requirement for low-latency and instantaneously encryption, NXP Semiconductors and its academic partners cooperate and design the low-latency block cipher PRINCE. Another good example is the block cipher LED which is very compact in hardware, and whose designers also aim to maintain a reasonable software performance. In this paper, we demonstrate how to achieve high software performance of these two ciphers on the AVR 8-bit microcontrollers using bitslice technique. Our bitsliced implementations speed up the execution of these two ciphers several times with less memory usage than previous work. In addition to these two nibble-oriented ciphers, we also evaluate the software performance of a newly proposed lightweight block cipher RECTANGLE, whose design takes bitslicing into consider. Our results show that RECTANGLE has very high performance ranks among the existing block ciphers in the real-world usage scenarios on 8-bit microcontrollers.