The QARMA Block Cipher Family. Almost MDS Matrices Over Rings With Zero Divisors, Nearly Symmetric Even-Mansour Constructions With Non-Involutory Central Rounds, and Search Heuristics for Low-Latency S-Boxes

• Published in: IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology pp. 4 - 44
• Main Author: Roberto Avanzi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ruhr-Universität Bochum 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Almost MDS Matrices; Even-Mansour Schemes; Memory Encryption; Pointer Authentication; Reflection Ciphers; S-Box Search Heuristics; Short Hashes; Tweak Extension; Tweak Masking; Tweakable Block Ciphers

This paper introduces QARMA, a new family of lightweight tweakable block ciphers targeted at applications such as memory encryption, the generation of very short tags for hardware-assisted prevention of software exploitation, and the construction of keyed hash functions. QARMA is inspired by reflect...