GFLE: a low-energy lightweight block cipher based on a variant of generalized Feistel structure

Abstract

Low-energy lightweight block ciphers are essential for applications with extremely resource-constrained to reduce energy and maintain security. The trade-off between diffusion property and area is a widely studied issue in the design of low-energy block ciphers. In this paper, a low-energy lightweight block cipher named as GFLE is presented. The core cipher of GFLE uses a variant of the Generalized Feistel Structure (GFS) with 4-branch, which combines the Type-II GFS with the simplified Lai-Massey. The DRmax of GFLE has a one-round improvement over the Type-II GFS optimized by Suzaki et al. and the security margin is achieved in a shorter number of rounds. Moreover, an S-box with low-energy and good cryptographic properties is proposed by searching combinations based on gate-level circuits using a depth-first strategy. It exhibits better security properties and hardware performance compared to other S-boxes. The block cipher GFLE is implemented in ASIC with UMC UMC 0.18 μm. It has been proved that the energy of GFLE is lower than Midori, WARP, SKINNY, CRAFT, etc. in unified encryption and decryption (ED) circuits. GFLE reduces energy by 61.59% compared with SKINNY. The results show that GFLE in ED circuits consumes only 1596 Gate Equivalents (GEs) and 6.36 μJ/bit in area and energy, respectively.