Security Evaluation of Lightweight Encryption using new Cryptanalysis Techniques – SELECT

In the last decades, we have seen a large deployment of smart devices and contact-less smart cards, with applications to the Internet of Things and smart cities. These devices have strong security requirements as they communicate sensitive data, but they have very low resources available: constrained computing capabilities and limited energy. This led to security disasters with the use of weak homemade cryptography such as KeeLoq or MIFARE. More recently, the academic cryptography community has come up with dedicated lightweight designs such as PRESENT or SKINNY, and the NIST is currently organizing a competition to select the next worldwide standards. The goal of this project is to perform a wide security evaluation of the designs submitted to/chosen by the NIST competition, and of lightweight cryptographic algorithms in general. We will use latest cryptanalysis advances, but also propose new attacks; study classical attacks, but also physical ones (very powerful in such scenarios).