A light weight cryptographic solution for 6LoWPAN protocol stack

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography is an emerging field in the field of research, which endorses algorithms which are best suited for constrained environment. Design metrics like Gate Equivalence (GE), Memory Requirement, Power Consumption, and Throughput play a vital role in the applications like IoT. This paper presents the 6LoWPAN Protocol Stack which is a popular standard of communication for constrained devices. This paper presents an implementation of a lightweight 6LoWPAN Protocol stack by using a Light weight Cipher instead of regular heavy encryption cipher AES. The cipher proposed in this paper is specifically suitable for 6LoWPAN architecture as it addresses all the constraints possessed by wireless sensor nodes. The lightweight cipher proposed in the paper needs only 1856 bytes of FLASH and 1272 bytes of RAM memory which is less than any other standard existing lightweight cipher design. The proposed cipher’s power consumption is around 25 mW which is significantly less as compared to ISO certified lightweight cipher PRESENT which consumes around 38 mW of dynamic power. This paper also discusses the detailed analysis of cipher against the attacks like Linear Cryptanalysis, Differential Cryptanalysis, Biclique attack and Avalanche attack. The cipher implementation on hardware is around 1051 GE’s for 64 bit of block size with 128 bit of key length which is less as compared to existing lightweight cipher design. The proposed cipher LiCi-2 is motivated from LiCi cipher design but outclasses it in every design metric. We believe the design of LiCi-2 is the obvious choice for researchers to implement in constrained environments like IoT.