Hummingbird: Ultra-Lightweight Cryptography for Resource- Constrained Devices

Abstract. Due to the tight cost and constrained resources of high-volume consumer devices such as RFID tags, smart cards and wireless sensor nodes, it is desirable to employ lightweight and specialized cryp-tographic primitives for many security applications. Motivated by the design of the well-known Enigma machine, we present a novel ultra-lightweight cryptographic algorithm, referred to as Hummingbird, for resource-constrained devices in this paper. Hummingbird can provide the designed security with small block size and is resistant to the most com-mon attacks such as linear and differential cryptanalysis. Furthermore, we also present efficient software implementation of Hummingbird on the 8-bit microcontroller ATmega128L from Atmel and the 16-bit microcon-troller MSP430 from Texas Instruments, respectively. Our experimental results show that after a system initialization phase Hummingbird can achieve up to 147 and 4:7 times faster throughput for a size-optimized and a speed-optimized implementations, respectively, when compared to the state-of-the-art ultra-lightweight block cipher PRESENT [10] on the similar platforms