Hardware implementation of secure lightweight cryptographic designs for IoT applications

Abstract

The recent expansion of the Internet of Things is creating a new world of smart devices in which security implications are very significant. Besides the claimed security level, the IoT devices are usually featured with constrained resources, such as low computation capability, low memory, and limited battery. Lightweight cryptographic primitives are proposed in the context of IoT while considering the trade-off between security guarantee and good performance. In this paper, we present optimized hardware, lightweight cryptographic designs, of 32-bit datapath, LED 64/128, SIMON 64/128, and SIMECK 64/128 algorithms, for constrained devices. Our proposed designs are investigated on Spartan-3, Spartan-6, and Zynq-7000 FPGA platforms in terms of area, speed, efficiency, and power consumption. The proposed designs achieved a high throughput up to 891.99 Mbps, 838.95 Mbps, and 210.13 Mbps for SIMECK 64/128, SIMON 64/128, and LED 64/128 on Zynq-7000, respectively. A deep comparison between our three proposed designs is elaborated on different FPGA families for adequate FPGAs-based application deployment. Test results and security analysis show that not only can our proposed designs achieve good encryption results with high performance and a low reduced cost but also they are secure enough to resist statistical attacks.