Evaluating the Performance of Lightweight Ciphers in Constrained Environments—The Case of Saturnin

Abstract

The use of lightweight cryptographic algorithms is essential for addressing security in highly constrained environments such as the Internet of Things. In this paper, the performance of lightweight block ciphers in such highly constrained environments is studied. More precisely, focusing—as a case study—on an important family of lightweight ciphers called “Saturnin”, which has been evaluated as a candidate for standardization in the relative ongoing NIST’s competition, we analyze its efficiency in case that it is implemented in a specific resource-constrained environment. To evaluate the results, a comparative study with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is performed, through an appropriate experimental environment. Our results illustrate that significant gain in performance can be achieved, since Saturnin—whose design is inspired by the design of AES—can be almost two times faster than AES in such restricted environments.