This is an implementation of the PRINCE lightweight block cipher as described in this paper. It encrypts individual blocks of 64 bit length with a 128 bit key.

PRINCE was specifically designed to achieve minimum latency while still providing good security. In addition, the area requirement of a hardware implementation should be small enough to allow the cipher to be used in very constrained environments.

The authors of PRINCE encourage using a fully-unrolled design, i.e. having separate components for every round of the cipher, which are chained together. This ensures minimum latency with acceptable area overhead; one plaintext block is encrypted in a single clock cycle.

prince_top is the top-level module. It performs key whitening at the start and end of the algorithm. In between, the actual encryption is performed by calling prince_core.

prince_core is the actual cipher implementation. It generates all the components for the 12 rounds of the cipher.

S-Boxes (non-linear layer) and permutation (linear layer) reside in separate files (sbox, linear_m etc.).

The Vivado project file (*.xpr) is configured to use the Digilent Zybo FPGA board for synthesis. This board is not available by default in Vivado (at least not if you are using the WebPACK edition). To obtain the required board files for the Zybo (and other boards by Digilent), refer to this wiki entry.

The code is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. For more information, please see the LICENSE.md file.