Lightweight cryptography for the cloud: Exploit the power of bitslice implementation

Abstract

This paper shows the great potential of lightweight cryptography in fast and timing-attack resistant software implementations in cloud computing by exploiting bitslice implementation. This is demonstrated by bitslice implementations of the PRESENT and Piccolo light-weight block ciphers. In particular, bitsliced PRESENT-80/128 achieves 4.73 cycles/byte and Piccolo-80 achieves 4.57 cycles/byte including data conversion on an Intel Xeon E3-1280 processor (Sandy Bridge microarchitecture). It is also expected that bitslice implementation offers resistance to side channel attacks such as cache timing attacks and cross-VM attacks in a multi-tenant cloud environment. Lightweight cryptography is not limited to constrained devices, and this work opens the way to its application in cloud computing. © 2012 International Association for Cryptologic Research.