• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.401-410
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• 2023

In this paper, we propose optimization methods for implementing SPARKLE, one of the NIST LWC finalists, on a 64-bit ARMv8 processor. The proposed methods consist of two approaches: an implementation using ARM A64 instructions and another using NEON ASIMD instructions. The A64-based implementation is optimized by performing register scheduling to efficiently utilize the available registers on the ARMv8 architecture. By utilizing the optimized A64-based implementation, we can achieve speeds that are 1.69 to 1.81 times faster than the C reference implementation on a Raspberry Pi 4B. The ASIMD-based implementation, on the other hand, optimizes data by parallelizing the ARX-boxes to perform more than three of them concurrently through a single vector instruction. While the general speed of the optimized ASIMD-based implementation is lower than that of the A64-based implementation, it only slows down by 1.2 times compared to the 2.1 times slowdown observed in the A64-based implementation as the block size increases from SPARKLE256 to SPARKLE512. This is an advantage of the ASIMD-based implementation. Therefore, the ASIMD-based implementation is more efficient for SPARKLE variant block cipher or permutation designs with larger block sizes than the original SPARKLE, making it a useful resource.