Lightweight Cryptography for FPGAs

Abstract

The advent of new low-power field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) for battery powered devices opens a host of new applications to FPGAs. In order to provide security on resource constrained devices lightweight cryptographic algorithms have been developed. However, there has not been much research on porting these algorithms to FPGAs. In this paper we propose lightweight cryptography for FPGAs by introducing block cipher independent optimization techniques for Xilinx Spartan3 FPGAs and applying them to the lightweight cryptographic algorithms HIGHT and present. Our implementations are the first reported of these block ciphers on FPGAs. Furthermore, they are the smallest block cipher implementations on FPGAs using only 117 and 91 slices respectively, which makes them comparable in size to stream cipher implementations. Both are less than half the size of the AES implementation by Chodowiec and Gaj without using block RAMs. Present's throughput over area ratio of 240 Kbps/slice is similar to that of AES, however, HIGHT outperforms them by far with 720 Kbps/slice.