Energy Efficient Lightweight Cryptography Algorithms for IoT Devices

Abstract

Over few decades, people have been working on providing security solutions, whereas attackers too have been working simultaneously. We present an evaluation of security algorithms, comparing performances and robustness. These comparisons are performed after hardware implementation and use crypt analysis. The targeted devices are wrist watches, RFID tags, IoT devices and others, which don't have a lot of areas (millions of gate equivalent). While performing this, the primary concern has been exploration of an algorithm that can work in these constrained limits. This led to a search for an algorithm that has low hardware footprints, low power consumption and better speed but at the same time implements adequate security. PRESENT has been found to be one such suitable algorithm. It has been also included in the new international standard for light-weight cryptographic methods under ISO/IEC 29192-2:2012 for its straight forward and light design. Our paper reports hardware implementation results of PRESENT, AES, ECDH, DH and RSA cryptography algorithms. We have implemented these algorithms with standard gate library of UMC-90 nm. Each algorithm has its own architecture and hence requires different crypt-analysis techniques like brute force, Pollard's Rho and biclique for “difficulty to break” measurement. It is a measure in term of time and data complexity of efforts required of a cryptographic attack. We have obtained improvement in area and improvement in power for modified PRESENT algorithm as compared to AES. It has also been observed that the proposed PRESENT algorithm has a time complexity of break attack as for 128 bit key length.