Midori: A Block Cipher for Low Energy

In the past few years, lightweight cryptography has become a popular research discipline with a number of ciphers and hash functions proposed. The designers’ focus has been predominantly to minimize the hardware area, while other goals such as low latency have been addressed rather recently only. However, the optimization goal of low energy for block cipher design has not been explicitly addressed so far. At the same time, it is a crucial measure of goodness for an algorithm. Indeed, a cipher optimized with respect to energy has wide applications, especially in constrained environments running on a tight power/energy budget such as medical implants. This paper presents the block cipher Midori 4 that is optimized with respect to the energy consumed by the circuit per bit in encryption or decryption operation. We deliberate on the design choices that lead to low energy consumption in an electrical circuit, and try to optimize each component of the circuit as well as its entire architec...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ASIACRYPT
• Authors: Subhadeep Banik, Andrey Bogdanov, Takanori Isobe, Kyoji Shibutani, Harunaga Hiwatari, Toru Akishita, Francesco Regazzoni
• Keywords: ASIACRYPT 2015, Cryptology