SUMER: A New Family of Lightweight and Traditional Block Ciphers with Multi-Modes

Abstract

With the recent increase in the risks and attacks facing our daily lives and digital environment around us,
the trend towards securing data has become inevitable. Block ciphers play a crucial role in modern crypto-applications
such as secure network storage and signatures and are used to safeguard sensitive information. The present paper
develops a new variant of the symmetric model called SUMER family ciphers with three equivalent modes: lightweight,
conventional (traditional), and extended ciphers. SUMER name belongs to one of the oldest civilizations in
Mesopotamia and stands for Secure Universal Model of Encryption Robust Cipher. The SUMER cipher is based on a
simple and robust symmetric structure and involves solid algebraic theories that completely depend on the Galois Field
GF(28
). SUMER cipher is designed to work with two involutional structures of the Substitution-Permutation Network
(SPN) and Feistel structure. These two involutional structures mean that the same algorithm is used for the encryption
and decryption process, and only the algorithm of the ciphering key is used in reverse order in both structures. The
SUMER lightweight structure is an elegant mode that does not need building an S-Box that requires a large amount of
memory and a number of electronic logical gates as S-Box construction has been canceled and replaced by the on-fly
computation clue, which does not need a reserved memory for building S-Box. SUMER family ciphers also can work in
a traditional mode or as an extended mode with high margin security. This family of ciphers is applicable with multimodes of various utilizations. The proposed ciphers are designed to be byte-oriented, showing good evaluation and
results under several measurement tests for speed, time implementation, and efficiency.