GIFT: A small present: Towards reaching the limit of lightweight encryption

Abstract

In this article, we revisit the design strategy of PRESENT, leveraging all the advances provided by the research community in construction and cryptanalysis since its publication, to push the design up to its limits. We obtain an improved version, named GIFT, that provides a much increased efficiency in all domains (smaller and faster), while correcting the well-known weakness of PRESENT with regards to linear hulls. GIFT is a very simple and clean design that outperforms even SIMON or SKINNY for round-based implementations, making it one of the most energy efficient ciphers as of today. It reaches a point where almost the entire implementation area is taken by the storage and the Sboxes, where any cheaper choice of Sbox would lead to a very weak proposal. In essence, GIFT is composed of only Sbox and bit-wiring, but its natural bitslice data flow ensures excellent performances in all scenarios, from area-optimised hardware implementations to very fast software implementation on high-end platforms. We conducted a thorough analysis of our design with regards to state-of-the-art cryptanalysis, and we provide strong bounds with regards to differential/linear attacks.