English

Dimming Down LED: An Open-source Threshold Implementation on Light Encryption Device (LED) Block Cipher

Cryptography and Security 2021-08-30 v1

Abstract

Lightweight block ciphers have been widely used in applications such as RFID tags, IoTs, and network sensors. Among them, with comparable parameters, the Light Encryption Device (LED) block cipher achieves the smallest area. However, implementation of encryption algorithms manifest side-channel leakage, therefore, it is crucial to protect their design against side-channel analyses. In this paper, we present a threshold implementation of the LED cipher which has 64-bit data input and 128-bit key. The presented design splits secret information among multiple shares to achieve a higher security level. We demonstrate that our implementation can protect against first-order power side-channel attacks. As a cost, the design area is almost doubled and the maximum operating frequency is degraded by 30%. To make our design verifiable, we have also open-sourced our design online.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.12079,
  title  = {Dimming Down LED: An Open-source Threshold Implementation on Light Encryption Device (LED) Block Cipher},
  author = {Yuan Yao and Mo Yang and Pantea Kiaei and Patrick Schaumont},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.12079},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Side-channel Analysis, Side-channel Countermeasure, Threshold Implementation, Open-source

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:27:30.076Z