First published 2013 | Related to | |
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Designers Ray Beaulieu, Douglas Shors, Jason Smith, Stefan Treatman-Clark, Bryan Weeks, Louis Wingers NSA Key sizes 64, 72, 96, 128, 144, 192 or 256 bits Block sizes 32, 48, 64, 96 or 128 bits Structure Balanced Feistel network | ||
Simon is a family of lightweight block ciphers publicly released by the National Security Agency (NSA) in June 2013. Simon has been optimized for performance in hardware implementations, while its sister algorithm, Speck, has been optimized for software implementations.
Description of the cipher
The Simon block cipher is a balanced Feistel cipher with an n-bit word, and therefore the block length is 2n. The key length is a multiple of n by 2, 3, or 4, which is the value m. Therefore, a Simon cipher implementation is denoted as Simon2n/nm. For example, Simon64/128 refers to the cipher operating on a 64-bit plaintext block (n=32) that uses a 128-bit key. The block component of the cipher is uniform between the Simon implementations; however, the key generation logic is dependent on the implementation of 2, 3 or 4 keys.
Simon supports the following combinations of block sizes, key sizes and number of rounds: