Design considerations of lightweight block ciphers for low-cost embedded devices

Abstract

In the 21st century, Internet of Things (IoT) has become pivotal technology and has attracted worldwide attention in the smart computing environment. In order to enjoy the benefits of this new environment, security is considered as the main aspect in constrained end nodes. Ordinary cryptographic solutions are not sufficient for resource constraint devices. To fulfill this gap, a relatively new field of cryptography called lightweight cryptography came into existence. Furthermore, designing lightweight ciphers especially software oriented poses some significant limits and inherent conditions. Some design considerations of a lightweight encryption algorithm and tradeoffs for minimizing resource requirements are presented in this paper. Also, for a cipher, it is necessary to provide strong resistance against attacks. In this paper different countermeasures to prevent from attacks is also presented. By considering the performance-enhancing ideas presented in this paper, a new GFN based lightweight block cipher is proposed. A cipher design has two main parts; internal structure and key schedule. The internal structure of the proposed design has three layers in which operations are so arranged that it utilizes small code size and has fast diffusion. Besides, design of newly proposed cipher is such that it thwarts the effect of most of the attacks. In the nutshell, this paper serves as a base for designing good lightweight cipher for resource constraint smart IOT environment.