Design and implementation of various datapath architectures for the ANU lightweight cipher on an FPGA

Abstract

Since the dawn of the Internet of Things (IoT), data and system security has been the major concern for developers. Because most IoT devices operate on 8-bit controllers with limited storage and computation power, encryption and decryption need to be implemented at the transmitting and receiving ends, respectively, using lightweight ciphers. We present novel architectures for hardware implementation for the ANU cipher and present results associated with each architecture. The ANU cipher is implemented at 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-bit datapath sizes on four different field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms under the same implementation condition, and the results are compared on every performance metric. Unlike previous ANU architectures, the new architectures have parallel substitution boxes (S-boxes) for high throughput and hardware optimization. With these different datapath designs, ANU cipher proves to be the obvious choice for implementing security in extremely resource-constrained systems.