All the HIGHT You Need on Cortex–M4

Abstract

In this paper, we present high-speed and secure implementations of HIGHT block cipher on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. We utilized both data parallelism and task parallelism to reduce the execution timing. In particular, we used the 32-bit wise ARM–SIMD instruction sets to perform the parallel computations in efficient way. Since the HIGHT block cipher is constructed upon 8-bit word, four 8-bit operations are performed in the 32-bit wise ARM–SIMD instruction of ARM Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. We also presented a novel countermeasure against fault attack on target microcontrollers. The method achieved the fault attack resistance with intra-instruction redundancy feature with reasonable performance. Finally, the proposed HIGHT implementation achieved much better performance and security level than previous works.