Design and characterization of LBlock cryptocore

Abstract

Today's headlines abound with the promised explosion of the Internet of things. Studies claim that there will be the existence of billions of internet connected devices in coming years. The small size and limited processing power of many connected devices could inhibit encryption and other robust security measure. Here cryptography plays a pivotal role. Also most of the devices available in the market today are resource constrained. Hence cryptographic solutions must be easy to implement and have high performance on a wide range of severely constrained devices. The relatively new field of lightweight cryptography provides significant advantages over existing algorithms when addressing security issues for highly constrained devices. In this project a detailed study of LBlock block cipher is done which is a lightweight cipher in both hardware and 8-bit platforms and an IP core is developed. The block size of LBlock is 64-bit and the key size is 80-bit and it can achieve competitive hardware and software performances when compared with other known lightweight block ciphers. The security evaluation shows that LBlock can achieve enough security margin against known attacks such as differential cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis, impossible differential cryptanalysis and related-key attacks etc. LBlock cryptocore is designed, build and characterized for the efficient implementation in low resource devices. It can serve as a benchmark for the hardware design engineers to model devices that utilizes lightweight characteristics. LBlock cipher is implemented on Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA (XC6LX16-CS324) and its performance metrics were obtained.