Innovative Security Solutions for Information Technology and Communications

The term ultralightweight refers to a special approach to cryptographic design, which uses just basic operations as and, or, xor, + mod n and cyclic shift. It has been developed in the last years, in the context of authentication protocols, to provide very efficient and secure solutions. In this short note, we discuss the motivations behind its introduction, and outline its key ideas and features. By overviewing some previous works, and picking up from them some examples, we describe typical weaknesses which have been found in almost all the proposed protocols. We point out that, at the state of current knowledge, serious doubts about the soundness of the approach and, in general, about what can be obtained with it, are present. Neverthless, since many questions are on the ground without answers, we argue that further investigations in the field are needed. To this aim, we throw a quick look at the close area of lightweight cryptography, briefly describing some successful design strategies and modeling techniques. We suggest that, instead of keeping pursuing ad-hoc solutions employing heuristic trials, working along these research directions could be beneficial also to the ultralightweight field.