An Extended Type-1 Generalized Feistel Networks: Lightweight Block Cipher for IoT

Abstract

In the last few years, a large amount of private and sensitive data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices need to be transmitted, stored, and processed in security, which become a serve challenge because these resource-constrained IoT devices cannot satisfy the requirements of conventional encryption ciphers. In this article, we propose the extended Type-1 generalized Feistel networks (Type-1 EGFNs) to improve the diffusion speed of Type-1 generalized Feistel networks (Type-1 GFNs). We instantiate Type-1 EGFNs into a lightweight block cipher that is named ALLPC, and analyze the performance of the cipher in terms of software implementation, hardware implementation, and security. The Type-1 EGFNs overcome the shortcoming of slow diffusion of Type-1 GFNs, and the ALLPC cipher is quite suitable for the resource-constrained IoT environment. Compared with other existing lightweight block ciphers, the ALLPC cipher can achieve compact hardware and low-cost software (e.g., low memory) while having low execution time, high throughput, and low energy consumption on the 32-bit ARM-Cortex M3 STM32F103 platform. In our security analysis, the ALLPC cipher can attain sufficient security degree against differential cryptanalysis, zero-correlation attack, and linear cryptanalysis, and owns a meaningful avalanche effect. Experimental results shows that our ALLPC cipher outperforms other existing lightweight ciphers in throughput, execution time and energy consumption.