This software is a computer program whose purpose is to implement lightweight block ciphers with different optimizations for the x86 platform. Three algorithms have been implemented: PRESENT, LED and Piccolo. Three techniques have been explored: table based implementations, vperm (for vector permutation) and bitslice implementations. For more details on these techniques and their adaptation to the algorithms, please refer to the SAC 2013 paper. The pdf of the extended paper is here.

Here is a big picture of how the code is divided:

• src/common contains common headers, structures and functions.
• src/table contains table based implementations, with the code that generates the tables in src/table/gen_tables. The code here is written in pure C so it should compile on any platform (x86 and other architectures), as well as any OS flavour (*nix, Windows ...).
• src/vperm contains vperm based implementations. They are written in inline assembly for x86_64 and will only compile and work on this platform. The code only compiles with gcc, but porting it to other assembly flavours should not be too complicated.
• src/bitslice contains bitslice based implementations. They are written in asm intrinsics. It should compile and run on i386 as well as x86_64 platforms, and it should be portable to other OS flavours since intrinsics are standard among many compilers.

NOTE1: vperm and bitslice implementations require a x86 CPU with at least SSSE3 extensions.

NOTE2: the code has been tested on Linux (Debian), but it should work on any environment with a decent gcc compiler (Mac OS, Windows with Cygwin ...).

• Ryad Benadjila (mailto:ryad.benadjila@ssi.gouv.fr)
• Jian Guo (mailto:ntu.guo@gmail.com])
• Victor Lomné (mailto:victor.lomne@ssi.gouv.fr)
• Thomas Peyrin (mailto:thomas.peyrin@gmail.com)

The program only requires the autotools package, though it is not mandatory. If you don't want to use autotools, just copy the Makefile.default as a Makefile and compile the code. Please note however that depending on your CPU type, you might need to adapt the Makefile.

NOTE: the autotools are used in the project to automatically detect the CPU and adapt the compilation options.

./configure

make

The produced files are in the bin directory. They consist of a .so dynamic library containing the ciphers as well as a standalone binary that tests the reference vectors of the ciphers and their performance for each implementation type. The standalone binary dynamically loads the library with dlopen.

The configure script takes some options to restrict the ciphers and the implementation flavours one wants to compile in the library. One can also force a given architecture (i386 or x86_64) as well as other specific options described through the script help:

./configure --help

--with-led          LED cipher
--with-led64        LED  cipher/64-bit  key  variant
--with-led128       LED  cipher/128-bit  key  variant
--with-present      PRESENT  cipher
--with-present80    PRESENT  cipher/80-bit  key  variant
--with-present128   PRESENT  cipher/128-bit  key  variant
--with-piccolo      Piccolo  cipher
--with-piccolo80    Piccolo  cipher/80-bit  key  variant
--with-piccolo128   Piccolo  cipher/128-bit  key  variant
--with-table        Table  implementations
--with-vperm        Vperm  implementations
--with-bitslice     Bitslice  implementations
--with-ssse         SSSE  implementations
--with-avx          AVX  implementations
--with-thread-safe  Thread  safe  library  (link  with  pthread)
--with-arch32       Force  32-bit  compilation
--with-arch64       Force  64-bit  compilation

Running the tests is as simple as:

cd bin

./check_all_ciphers

The main binary takes options that restrict the execution to test vectors or performance benchmark only, or to some implemenations only. The number of samples used for benchmark can also be tuned here. The default is to use bash colors for a better readability, but one can turn this off (e.g. for logging the results in a file).

./check_all_ciphers -h
Usage: ./check_all_ciphers (LED|PRESENT|Piccolo|LED64|LED128|PRESENT80|PRESENT128|Piccolo80|Piccolo128) 
(table|vperm|bitslice|bitslice8|bitslice16|bitslice32)
Other options:
-no-colors
-perf-only
-vectors-only
-samples=[0-9]*

The key schedule as well as the core encryption cipher of the three lightweight block ciphers have been implemented in the different flavours (table, vperm and bitslice). We have tried to make it as easy to use as possible for users by chosing a common API that takes into account the parallelism offered by each technique (please refer to the paper for details about how performances really depend on use cases of the cipher and how the chosen parallelism can impact them).

The common API naming convention is:

Cipher ## key_size ## implementation_type ## implementation (with ## being the concatenation), where:

• Cipher is one of LED, PRESENT, Piccolo
• key_size is one of 64 or 128 for LED, 80 or 128 for PRESENT and Piccolo
• implementation_type is one of table (for LED, PRESENT, Piccolo), vperm (for LED, PRESENT, Piccolo), bitslice8 (for PRESENT), bitslice16 (for LED, PRESENT and Piccolo) and bitslice32 (for LED)
• implementation is one of key_schedule, core (for encryption) and cipher (for combined key schedule and encryption)

For instance, LED64bitslice16_core is the bitslice implementation of the encryption core of LED for a 64-bit key size and 16 parallel blocks as input. Similarly, PRESENT80vperm_key_schedule is the vperm key schedule of PRESENT for a 80-bit key size (vperm has a 2 blocks parallelism). Finally, Piccolo128table_cipher is the table based implementation of the combined key schedule and encryption of Piccolo for a 128-bit key (table based implementations have a parallelism of 1 block).

We emphasize the fact that in order to get results consistent with the ones given in the SAC 2013 paper, one must disable new Intel CPUs Turbo Boost technology. This technology uses dynamic upscale of the processor to locally overclock it. We use the rdtsc instruction to perform CPU cycles measurements: the cycle count obtained here can be desynchronized with the real CPU clock when Turbo Boost is active.

Turbo Boost can be disabled from the BIOS. A more user-friendly solution under Linux is to use MSR (model specific) register 0x1a0 to dynamically disable/enable it on chosen CPU cores. One must first insert the msr module:

modprobe -i msr

Then, to disable Turbo Boost on the CPU number 'cpu':

wrmsr -p cpu 0x1a0 0x4000850089

To enable it back:

wrmsr -p cpu 0x1a0 0x850089