Performance analysis of current lightweight stream ciphers for constrained environments

Abstract

Maintaining an adequate balance between security and other performance metrics like memory requirement, throughput and energy requirement in a resource-constrained environment is a major challenge. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in its latest lightweight cryptography report, suggested the suitability of symmetric ciphers in constrained devices. In this paper we have performed statistical security analyses of six state-of-the-art stream ciphers, namely Lizard, Fruit, Plantlet, Sprout, Grain v1 and Espresso, with the help of randomness test, structural test, autocorrelation test and avalanche test. We have also carried out the performance analysis of these ciphers in detail after porting the optimized code of the ciphers to a low-cost microcontroller, namely ATmega 328P. The selection of the device is based on its acceptability in the Internet of Things (IoT)-based network. The statistical security, performance metrics and comparative analysis suggest the suitability of the selected ciphers for providing security in constrained environments.