LEA-RECT: A Parallel Hybrid Lightweight Block Cipher Combining ARX Diffusion and Bit-Slice S-Box Nonlinearity for Big-Data-At-Rest Encryption
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29304/jqcsm.2026.18.33189Keywords:
lightweight cryptography, hybrid block cipher, LEA, RECTANGLE, ARX, bit-slice S-box, big data, HDFS,Abstract
The rapid growth of big-data platforms such as Hadoop/HDFS has intensified the need to protect very large volumes of data at rest without imposing the heavy cost of conventional block ciphers. Purely ARX-based lightweight ciphers (e.g., LEA) achieve fast word-level diffusion but contain no substitution box, and therefore rely solely on modular addition for nonlinearity; purely substitution-permutation ciphers (e.g., RECTANGLE) provide strong algebraic nonlinearity through a bit-slice S-box but are comparatively slower for wide-word software encryption. This paper proposes LEA-RECT, a hybrid lightweight block cipher in which the most important component of a donor cipher (the RECTANGLE bit-slice 4×4 S-box) is embedded, in parallel, alongside the most important component of a host cipher (the LEA ARX round function), and the two branches are then mixed within every round. The construction operates on 128-bit blocks with a 128-bit key over 24 rounds, and is designed so that each round remains a bijection despite the parallel S-box injection. A complete reference implementation was built and validated: encryption/decryption round-trip correctness was confirmed over 30,000 random trials; the cipher attains a mean strict-avalanche of 50.05% for plaintext-bit changes and 50.02% for key-bit changes; ciphertext byte entropy of 7.9998 bits/byte; and it passes the NIST monobit (p=0.96), runs (p=0.96), and block-frequency (p=0.20) randomness tests. The parallel donor branch adds algebraic nonlinearity absent from the ARX host at a measured serial overhead of ~128% on our single-threaded reference implementation; based on the branches’ data-independence, the parallel overhead reduced by simulation to ~32% under 4-way SIMD comparing with serial algorithm, and pending hardware validation.
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