Piccolo: An ultra-lightweight blockcipher

Abstract

We propose a new 64-bit blockcipher Piccolo supporting 80 and 128-bit keys. Adopting several novel design and implementation techniques, Piccolo achieves both high security and notably compact implementation in hardware. We show that Piccolo offers a sufficient security level against known analyses including recent related-key differential attacks and meet-in-the-middle attacks. In our smallest implementation, the hardware requirements for the 80 and the 128-bit key mode are only 683 and 758 gate equivalents, respectively. Moreover, Piccolo requires only 60 additional gate equivalents to support the decryption function due to its involution structure. Furthermore, its efficiency on the energy consumption which is evaluated by energy per bit is also remarkable. Thus, Piccolo is one of the competitive ultra-lightweight blockciphers which are suitable for extremely constrained environments such as RFID tags and sensor nodes. © 2011 International Association for Cryptologic Research.