Abstract
The use of lightweight cryptographic algorithms is essential for addressing security in highly constrained environments such as the Internet of Things. In this paper, the performance of lightweight block ciphers in such highly constrained environments is studied. More precisely, focusing—as a case study—on an important family of lightweight ciphers called “Saturnin”, which has been evaluated as a candidate for standardization in the relative ongoing NIST’s competition, we analyze its efficiency in case that it is implemented in a specific resource-constrained environment. To evaluate the results, a comparative study with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is performed, through an appropriate experimental environment. Our results illustrate that significant gain in performance can be achieved, since Saturnin—whose design is inspired by the design of AES—can be almost two times faster than AES in such restricted environments.
Highlights
Evaluating the Performance ofThe vision of Internet of Things (IoT) becomes highly prevalent into a wide range of modern applications
The Saturnin-Short should not be used in practice for messages with sizes larger than 128 bits, this restriction, which exists for security reasons, does not affect our analysis since we focus only on its performance
In order to illustrate more clearly the comparison between Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Saturnin in terms of performance, the server repeats, for both cases, the encryption algorithm 500 times and, at the subsequent iteration, it sends the encrypted message to the “client”
Summary
Evaluating the Performance ofThe vision of Internet of Things (IoT) becomes highly prevalent into a wide range of modern applications. Lightweight cryptography is being used for providing security services, such as data confidentiality and integrity, in cases which necessitate the efficient implementation of cryptographic algorithms in constrained devices—including IoT applications, and any other application area with the above characteristics (e.g., RFID communications). To this end, NIST has initiated a process to solicit, evaluate, and standardize lightweight cryptographic algorithms that are suitable for use in constrained environments where the performance of current NIST cryptographic standards is not acceptable [5]. It should be pointed out that, as an explicit requirement that NIST has set, each submission to the NIST competition should contain a family of AEAD
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