ALLPC: A Lightweight Block Cipher Based on Generalized Feistel Networks for IoT

Abstract

As millions of intelligent devices are gradually deployed at the edge of networks, a large amount of private and sensitive data generated at those devices need to be transmitted, stored and processed safely among these devices, which become a serve challenge because these resource constrained IoT devices cannot satisfy the requirements of conventional encryption ciphers. In this paper, we propose the extended Type-1 generalized Feistel networks (Type-1 EGFNs) and instantiate it into a lightweight block cipher called ALLPC. We analyze performance of the cipher in security, software implementation and hardware implementation. The Type-1 EGFNs overcomes the shortcomings of slow diffusion of Type-1 GFNs. Compared with other existing lightweight block ciphers, experimental results shows that ALLPC cipher can achieve compact hardware and low-performance software (e.g. low memory) while having low execution time, high throughput and low energy consumption on 32-bit ARM-Cortex M3 STM32F103 platform. In our security analysis, ALLPC cipher can attain adequate security level against many different attacks.