Triathlon of Lightweight Block Ciphers for the Internet of Things
Triathlon of Lightweight Block Ciphers for the Internet of Things Daniel Dinu, Yann Le Corre, Dmitry Khovratovich, Léo Perrin, Johann Großschädl, and Alex Biryukov SnT and CSC, University of Luxembourg Maison du Nombre, 6, Avenue de la Fonte, L–4364 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg {dumitru-daniel.dinu,yann.lecorre,dmitry.khovratovich,leo.perrin}@uni.lu {johann.groszschaedl,alex.biryukov}@uni.lu Abstract. In this paper we introduce a framework for the benchmarking of lightweight block ciphers on a multitude of embedded platforms. Our framework is able to evaluate the execution time, RAM footprint, as well as binary code size, and allows one to define a custom “figure of merit” according to which all evaluated candidates can be ranked. We used the framework to benchmark implementations of 19 lightweight ciphers, namely AES, Chaskey, Fantomas, HIGHT, LBlock, LEA, LED, Piccolo, PRE- SENT, PRIDE, PRINCE, RC5, RECTANGLE, RoadRunneR, Robin, Simon, SPARX, Speck, and TWINE, on three microcontroller platforms: 8-bit AVR, 16-bit MSP430, and 32-bit ARM. Our results bring some new insights to the question of how well these lightweight ciphers are suited to secure the Internet of Things (IoT). The benchmarking framework provides cipher designers with an easy-to-use tool to compare new algorithms with the state-of-the-art and allows standardization organizations to conduct a fair and consistent evaluation of a large number of candidates. Keywords: IoT, lightweight cryptography, block ciphers, evaluation framework, benchmarking. 1 Introduction The Internet of Things (IoT) is a frequently-used term to describe the currently ongoing evolution of the Internet into a network of smart objects (“things”) with the ability to communicate with each other and to access centralized resources via the IPv6 (resp.
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