Quark: a lightweight hash

Quark is a family of cryptographic hash functions designed for resource-constrained hardware environments, as RFID tags. Our main goal was to minimize the area occupation and the power consumption, while offering strong enough security guarantees.

We propose three instances of Quark: u-Quark, d-Quark, and s-Quark were designed to provide at least 64-, 80-, and 112-bit security against all attacks (collisions, second preimages, length extension, multicollisions, etc.).

The table below summarizes the simulated hardware performance of Quark, when implemented in a 0.18 µm ASIC (area is given in gate-equivalents, power is the peak power). Security m, n means a security of m bits against collision and second preimage attacks, and of n bits against preimage attacks.


Hash function Security (bits) Area (GE) Speed (kbps) Power (µW)
Resource-optimized implementations @100 kHz
u-Quark 64, 128 1379 1.47 2.96
d-Quark 80, 160 1702 2.27 3.95
s-Quark 112, 224 2296 3.13 5.53
Speed-optimized implementations @714 MHz
u-Quark 64, 128 3032 84000 37.01
d-Quark 80, 160 3561 130000 43.35
s-Quark 112, 224 6220 357000 75.27


Quark was designed by Contact: jeanphilippe.aumasson@gmail.com

Downloads

The following files are available for download: