LightCrypt

Cryptanalysis studies the practical security of the encryption schemes we use. This project concerns cryptanalysis of resource constrained (so-called, ‘lightweight’) encryption schemes, deployed in most Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Our motivation is that in order to address the challenge of lightweight cryptography, it is not sufficient to adjust the current designs and analysis to the constrained environment. Instead, we must establish a new research methodology, aiming directly at the problems arising in the ‘lightweight realm’.

We plan to concentrate on four main directions. First, in order to enable conceptually new designs, we will study the security of the generic schemes serving as building blocks of most ciphers. Second, considering specific ciphers we will pursue low complexity cryptanalysis, being more relevant to the lightweight realm than ‘standard’ attacks. Third, we will pursue new directions toward establishing ‘white-box cryptography’. Finally, we will explore further applications of discrete analysis to lightweight cryptography.

The project began in October 2017 and will run until September 2022. The grant award was approximately 1,500,000 Euros.