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Ultralightweight Cryptography

Some Thoughts on Ten Years of Efforts

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Innovative Security Solutions for Information Technology and Communications (SECITC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11359))

Abstract

The term ultralightweight refers to a special approach to cryptographic design, which uses just basic operations as and, or, xor, \(+_{\bmod \,\, n}\) and cyclic shift. It has been developed in the last years, in the context of authentication protocols, to provide very efficient and secure solutions. In this short note, we discuss the motivations behind its introduction, and outline its key ideas and features. By overviewing some previous works, and picking up from them some examples, we describe typical weaknesses which have been found in almost all the proposed protocols. We point out that, at the state of current knowledge, serious doubts about the soundness of the approach and, in general, about what can be obtained with it, are present. Neverthless, since many questions are on the ground without answers, we argue that further investigations in the field are needed. To this aim, we throw a quick look at the close area of lightweight cryptography, briefly describing some successful design strategies and modeling techniques. We suggest that, instead of keeping pursuing ad-hoc solutions employing heuristic trials, working along these research directions could be beneficial also to the ultralightweight field.

Based on the joint works of the last years with A. De Santis, R. De Prisco and X. Carpenter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Actually, the entities are three: Tag, Reader, and a Backend Server. The channel between the Reader and the Backend Server is assumed to be secure. To simplify the description usually the Backend Server is not explicitely introduced and the Reader is assumed to perform directly the computations.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Xavier Carpenter, Roberto De Prisco and Alfredo De Santis for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Paolo D’Arco

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  1. Paolo D’Arco
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Correspondence to Paolo D’Arco .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inria-RBA, Rennes, France

    Jean-Louis Lanet

  2. Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

    Cristian Toma

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D’Arco, P. (2019). Ultralightweight Cryptography. In: Lanet, JL., Toma, C. (eds) Innovative Security Solutions for Information Technology and Communications. SECITC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11359. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12942-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12942-2_1

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