CHESS-64, a Block Cipher Based on Data-Dependent Operations: Design Variants and Hardware Implementation Efficiency

Security is an issue that has attracted the research community interest the last few years. The communication revolution has triggered the high needs for encryption algorithms and security schemes. Optimizations of the existing security standards as well as novel designs are proved issues of major importance in order the high needs for security to be satisfied. This work focuses the problem of further development of the approach to the fast cipher design based on data-dependent (DD) permutations (DDP). A new class of the DDP-like operations and their hardware implementation is presented. A new cipher CHESS-64 suitable to fast cheap implementation is designed and evaluated. Implementations issues and comparisons with common known ciphers are discussed. The introduced cipher based on a detailed variant study, is proven a flexible and trustworthy solution for the increased security needs of present and future.