Fast implementations of ARX-based lightweight block ciphers (SPARX, CHAM) on 32-bit processor

Abstract

Recently, many lightweight block ciphers are proposed, such as PRESENT, SIMON, SPECK, Simeck, SPARX, GIFT, and CHAM. Most of these ciphers are designed with Addition–Rotation–Xor (ARX)-based structure for the resource-constrained environment because ARX operations can be implemented efficiently, especially in software. However, if the word size of a block cipher is smaller than the register size of the target device, it may process inefficiently in the aspect of memory usage. In this article, we present a fast implementation method for ARX-based block ciphers, named two-way operation. Moreover, also we applied SPARX-64/128 and CHAM-64/128 and estimated the performance in terms of execution time (cycles per byte) on a 32-bit Advanced RISC Machines processor. As a result, we achieved a large amount of improvement in execution time. The cycles of round function and key schedule are reduced by 53.31% and 31.51% for SPARX-64/128 and 41.22% and 19.40% for CHAM-64/128.