ricik
Ricik is a lightweight, open‑source cryptographic library that implements the Ricik cipher, a symmetric‑key algorithm described in the 2019 paper “Ricik: A Substitution‑Permutation Network for Secure Embedded Systems.” The library was authored by a team of researchers at the University of Tartu, led by Dr. A. R. K. Vec, whose initials inspired the name. Ricik’s design focuses on low memory consumption and rapid execution, making it suitable for resource‑constrained environments such as smart cards, IoT devices, and embedded controllers.
The Ricik cipher itself follows a 64‑bit block size and 128‑bit key length. Its architecture consists of
The Ricik library is released under a permissive BSD‑3 style license, encouraging community contributions. It offers
Overall, Ricik represents a modest yet well‑designed approach to providing secure, high‑performance encryption in constrained devices,