Decorrelated fast cipher: An AES candidate well suited for low cost smart cards applications

Abstract

In response to the call for candidates issued by the National Institute for Standards and Technologies (the Advanced Encryption Standard project) the Ecole Normale Supérieure proposed a candidate called DFC as for “Decorrelated Fast Cipher”, based on the decorrelation technique that provides provable security against several classes of attacks (in particular the basic version of Biham and Shamir's Differential Cryptanalysis as well as Matsui's Linear Cryptanalysis). From a practical point of view, this algorithm is naturally very efficient when it is implemented on 64-bit processors. In this paper, we describe the implementation we made of DFC on a very low cost smart card based on the Motorola 6805 processor. The performances we obtain prove that DFC is also well suited for low cost devices applications.