FPGA Modeling and Optimization of a SIMON Lightweight Block Cipher.

Sa’Ed Abed,Bassam Mohd,Reem Jaffal,Mohammad Alshayeji

doi:10.3390/s19040913

Sa’Ed Abed, Bassam Mohd + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s19040913

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Abstract

Security of sensitive data exchanged between devices is essential. Low-resource devices (LRDs), designed for constrained environments, are increasingly becoming ubiquitous. Lightweight block ciphers provide confidentiality for LRDs by balancing the required security with minimal resource overhead. SIMON is a lightweight block cipher targeted for hardware implementations. The objective of this research is to implement, optimize, and model SIMON cipher design for LRDs, with an emphasis on energy and power, which are critical metrics for LRDs. Various implementations use field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. Two types of design implementations are examined: scalar and pipelined. Results show that scalar implementations require 39% less resources and 45% less power consumption. The pipelined implementations demonstrate 12 times the throughput and consume 31% less energy. Moreover, the most energy-efficient and optimum design is a two-round pipelined implementation, which consumes 31% of the best scalar’s implementation energy. The scalar design that consumes the least energy is a four-round implementation. The scalar design that uses the least area and power is the one-round implementation. Balancing energy and area, the two-round pipelined implementation is optimal for a continuous stream of data. One-round and two-round scalar implementations are recommended for intermittent data applications.

Highlights

There was a rapid growth in applications based on low-resource devices (LRDs), which include radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), smart cards, wireless body area networks (WBANs), and the Internet of things (IoT) [1]
LRDs are designed for constrained environments where cost, power consumption, energy, and available resources are limited
The results showed that SPECK had a small application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation; SIMON had the smallest area of all investigated ciphers

Summary

Introduction

There was a rapid growth in applications based on low-resource devices (LRDs), which include radio-frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), smart cards, wireless body area networks (WBANs), and the Internet of things (IoT) [1]. LRDs are designed for constrained environments where cost, power consumption, energy, and available resources are limited. As LRDs become ubiquitous in daily life, it is very important to protect the confidentiality of exchanged data. The challenge is to balance an adequate security level with the limited resources in LRDs. Special cipher implementation is required to optimize energy, power, and area while considering the constraints of the devices, such as ciphers or lightweight ciphers. Ciphers in cryptography are algorithms responsible for encryption and decryption operations for an input message or plaintext by applying certain steps to generate the ciphertext

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