High-speed KATAN ciphers on-a-chip

Security in embedded systems has become a main requirement in modern electronic devices. The demand for low-cost and highly secure cryptographic algorithms is increasingly growing in fields such as mobile telecommunications, handheld devices, etc. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the development of cheap and relatively fast hardware implementations of the KATAN family of block ciphers. KATAN is a family of six hardware oriented block ciphers. All KATAN ciphers share an 80-bit key and have 32, 48, or 64-bit blocks. We use VHDL under Altera Quartus in conjunction with ModelSim to implement and analyze our hardware designs. The developed designs are mapped onto high-performance Field Programmable Gate Arrays. We compare our findings with similar hardware implementations and C software versions of the algorithms. The performance analysis of the C implementations is done using Intel Vtune Amplifier running on Dell precision T7500 with its dual quad-core Xeon processor and 24 GB of RAM. The obtained results show better performance when compared with existing hardware and software implementations.