Fides: Lightweight Authenticated Cipher with Side-Channel Resistance for Constrained Hardware

In this paper, we present a novel lightweight authenticated cipher optimized for hardware implementations called Fides. It is an online nonce-based authenticated encryption scheme with authenticated data whose area requirements are as low as 793 GE and 1001 GE for 80-bit and 96-bit security, respectively.

This is at least two times smaller than its closest competitors Hummingbird-2 and Grain-128a. While being extremely compact, Fides is both throughput and latency efficient, even in its most serial implementations. This is attained by our novel sponge-like design approach. Moreover, cryptographically optimal 5-bit and 6-bit S-boxes are used as basic nonlinear components while paying a special attention on the simplicity of providing first order side-channel resistance with threshold implementation.