International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Tiago B. S. Reis

Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2017
CHES
PRESENT Runs Fast
Tiago B. S. Reis Diego F. Aranha Julio López
The PRESENT block cipher was one of the first hardware-oriented proposals for implementation in extremely resource-constrained environments. Its design is based on 4-bit S-boxes and a 64-bit permutation, a far from optimal choice to achieve good performance in software. As a result, most software implementations require large lookup tables in order to meet efficiency goals. In this paper, we describe a new portable and efficient software implementation of PRESENT, fully protected against timing attacks. Our implementation uses a novel decomposition of the permutation layer, and bitsliced computation of the S-boxes using optimized Boolean formulas, not requiring lookup tables. The implementations are evaluated in embedded ARM CPUs ranging from microcontrollers to full-featured processors equipped with vector instructions. Timings for our software implementation show a significant performance improvement compared to the numbers from the FELICS benchmarking framework. In particular, encrypting 128 bits using CTR mode takes about 2100 cycles on a Cortex-M3, improving on the best Assembly implementation in FELICS by a factor of 8. Additionally, we present the fastest masked implementation of PRESENT for protection against timing and other side-channel attacks in the scenario we consider, improving on related work by 15%. Hence, we conclude that PRESENT can be remarkably efficient in software if implemented with our techniques, and even compete with a software implementation of AES in terms of latency while offering a much smaller code footprint.