SHC: 8-bit Compact and Efficient S-Box Structure for Lightweight Cryptography

Abstract

The AES (Advance Encryption Standard) has made the development of new block ciphers unnecessary; it is now the de facto standard for most uses of block ciphers. However, the AES is still not well-suited for very limited contexts like RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tags and WSN(Wireless Sensor Networks), despite recent implementation advancements. In this study, we present SHC (Simple Hybrid Cipher), a new block cipher that uses a 64-bit block length and a 128-bit key length. It offers a hardware implementation that efficiently uses limited resources, making it ideal for use as a sensor in a WSN or an RFID tag. The core function of SHC depends on S-Box-based, composite field arithmetic technology, as it consumes relatively low cost on hardware implementation while still providing sufficient security as a solid encryption algorithm. The hardware implementation of SHC-64 requires 949 LUTs; it generates a maximum operating frequency of 515.995 MHz on the Xilinx-powered Artix-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development board. At the same time, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended standard algorithm AES consumes 3645 LUTs and generates a maximum operating frequency of 277.369 MHz. The SHC-64 cipher also shows resistance against known cryptanalytics attacks.