Performance Evaluation of Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms on RISC-V

Abstract

The cyber-security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has emerged as a critical research topic in proportion with their proliferation. Cryptographic algorithms are used to protect the large cyber-attack surfaces created by IoT devices. In addition to their industrial environment utilization, we also use them widely in our daily lives for providing services such as data confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Due to limited computational capacity, it is inefficient to use traditional cryptographic algorithms in cost-sensitive and low-power IoT devices. Researchers have developed many lightweight cryptographic algorithms for IoT devices to overcome this problem. Knowing the performance of lightweight cryptographic algorithms on the IoT device’s processor ahead, offers key advantages such as optimized cost for the design and shorter time-to-market. In this work, we comparatively studied the performance of various symmetric key lightweight cryptographic algorithms in terms of basic systems parameters such as speed, memory (RAM) space, and flash (ROM) footprint on the RISC-V synthesizable processor architecture suitable for use in IoT applications.