LRBC: a lightweight block cipher design for resource constrained IoT devices

Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) is now an in-demand technology that has been adopted in various applications and includes various embedded devices, sensors and other objects connected to the Internet. Due to the rapid development of this technology, it covers a significant portion of the research interests nowadays. IoT devices are typically designed for collecting different types of data from various sources and transmitting them in digitized form. However, data security is the burning issue in the IoT technology, which can broadly impact the privacy of crucial data. In this regard, a new lightweight encryption method called LRBC has been proposed in this work for resource constraint IoT devices which can provide data security at the sensing level. The LRBC has used the structural advantages of both substitution–permutation network (SPN) and Feistel structure together to achieve better security. Furthermore, the proposed method has been tested on NEXYS 4 DDR FPGA (Artix-7) trainer kit and implemented for application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip on TSMC 65 nm technology. The proposed algorithm consumes very less power of 11.40 μW and occupies a 258.9 GE (Gate Equivalent) area. Besides, a thorough security analysis shows that the proposed scheme ensures high security against various attacks with robustness. Moreover, the average avalanche effect of LRBC is found to be 58% and 55.75% concerning plaintext and key, respectively.