Design of a Linear Layer Optimised for Bitsliced 32-bit Implementation

Authors

  • Gaëtan Leurent Inria, Paris, France
  • Clara Pernot Inria, Paris, France

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46586/tosc.v2024.i1.441-458

Keywords:

Bitsliced cipher, Linear layer, Branch number

Abstract

The linear layer of block ciphers plays an important role in their security In particular, ciphers designed following the wide-trail strategy use the branch number of the linear layer to derive bounds on the probability of linear and differential trails. At FSE 2014, the LS-design construction was introduced as a simple and regular structure to design bitsliced block ciphers. It considers the internal state as a bit matrix, and applies alternatively an identical S-Box on all the columns, and an identical L-Box on all the lines. Security bounds are derived from the branch number of the L-Box.
In this paper, we focus on bitsliced linear layers inspired by the LS-design construction and the Spook AEAD algorithm. We study the construction of bitsliced linear transformations with efficient implementations using XORs and rotations (optimized for bitsliced ciphers implemented on 32-bit processors), and a high branch number. In order to increase the density of the activity patterns, the linear layer is designed on the whole state, rather than using multiple parallel copies of an L-Box. Our main result is a linear layer for 128-bit ciphers with branch number 21, improving upon the best 32-bit transformation with branch number 12, and the one of Spook with branch number 16.

Downloads

Published

2024-03-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Design of a Linear Layer Optimised for Bitsliced 32-bit Implementation. (2024). IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, 2024(1), 441-458. https://doi.org/10.46586/tosc.v2024.i1.441-458