Whirlwind: a new cryptographic hash function

A new cryptographic hash function Whirlwind is presented. We give the full specification and explain the design rationale. We show how the hash function can be implemented efficiently in software and give first performance numbers. A detailed analysis of the security against state-of-the-art cryptanalysis methods is also provided. In comparison to the algorithms submitted to the SHA-3 competition, Whirlwind takes recent developments in cryptanalysis into account by design. Even though software performance is not outstanding, it compares favourably with the 512-bit versions of SHA-3 candidates such as LANE or the original CubeHash proposal and is about on par with ECHO and MD6

Energy Efficient Security Framework for Wireless Local Area Networks

Wireless networks are susceptible to network attacks due to their inherentvulnerabilities. The radio signal used in wireless transmission canarbitrarily propagate through walls and windows; thus a wireless networkperimeter is not exactly known. This leads them to be more vulnerable toattacks such as eavesdropping, message interception and modifications comparedto wired-line networks. Security services have been used as countermeasures toprevent such attacks, but they are used at the expense of resources that arescarce especially, where wireless devices have a very limited power budget.Hence, there is a need to provide security services that are energy efficient.In this dissertation, we propose an energy efficient security framework. Theframework aims at providing security services that take into account energyconsumption. We suggest three approaches to reduce the energy consumption ofsecurity protocols: replacement of standard security protocol primitives thatconsume high energy while maintaining the same security level, modification ofstandard security protocols appropriately, and a totally new design ofsecurity protocol where energy efficiency is the main focus. From ourobservation and study, we hypothesize that a higher level of energy savings isachievable if security services are provided in an adjustable manner. Wepropose an example tunable security or TuneSec system, which allows areasonably fine-grained security tuning to provide security services at thewireless link level in an adjustable manner.We apply the framework to several standard security protocols in wirelesslocal area networks and also evaluate their energy consumption performance.The first and second methods show improvements of up to 70% and 57% inenergy consumption compared to plain standard security protocols,respectively. The standard protocols can only offer fixed-level securityservices, and the methods applied do not change the security level. The thirdmethod shows further improvement compared to fixed-level security by reducing(about 6% to 40%) the energy consumed. This amount of energy saving can bevaried depending on the configuration and security requirements

Customizable Sponge-Based Authenticated Encryption Using 16-bit S-boxes

Authenticated encryption (AE) is a symmetric key cryptographic scheme that aims to provide both confidentiality and data integrity. There are many AE algorithms in existence today. However, they are often far from ideal in terms of efficiency and ease of use. For this reason, there is ongoing effort to develop new AE algorithms that are secure, efficient, and easy to use. The sponge construction is a relatively new cryptographic primitive that has gained popularity since the sponge-based K ECCAK algorithm won the SHA-3 hashing competition. The duplex construction, which is closely related to the sponge, pro- vides promising potential for secure and efficient authenticated encryption. In this paper we introduce a novel authenticated encryption algorithm based on the duplex construction that is targeted for hardware implementation. We provide explicit customization guidelines for users who desire unique authenticated encryption solutions within our security margins. Our substitution step uses 16 × 16 AES-like S-boxes which are novel because they are the largest bijective S-boxes to be used by an encryption scheme in the literature and are still efficiently implementable in both hardware and software