Trade-off of security and performance of lightweight block ciphers in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Chao Pei,Wei Liang,Xiaojia Han,Yang Xiao

doi:10.1186/s13638-018-1121-6

Abstract

Lightweight block ciphers play an indispensable role for the security in the context of pervasive computing. However, the performance of resource-constrained devices can be affected dynamically by the selection of suitable cryptalgorithms, especially for the devices in the resource-constrained devices and/or wireless networks. Thus, in this paper, we study the trade-off between security and performance of several recent top performing lightweight block ciphers for the demand of resource-constrained Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks. Then, the software performance evaluation about these ciphers has been carried out in terms of memory occupation, cycles per byte, throughput, and a relative good comprehensive metric. Moreover, the results of avalanche effect, which shows the possibility to resist possible types of different attacks, are presented subsequently. Our results show that SPECK is the software-oriented lightweight cipher which achieves the best performance in various aspects, and it enjoys a healthy security margin at the same time. Furthermore, PRESENT, which is usually used as a benchmark for newer hardware-oriented lightweight ciphers, shows that the software performance combined with avalanche effect is inadequate when it is implemented. In the real application, there is a need to better understand the resources of dedicated platforms and security requirement, as well as the emphasis and focus. Therefore, this case study can serve as a good reference for the better selection of trade-off between performance and security in constrained environments.

Highlights

In the traditional resource-constrained environment, the constrained devices such as nodes in wireless sensor networks and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags usually have the characteristics of weak computation ability, extremely small storage space, and strictly usage of power consumption [1,2,3]
In the literature [24], a linear congruential generator (LCG)-based lightweight block cipher was presented, and this cipher can meet security co-existence requirements of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and RFID systems for pervasive computing, but our experiments show that the avalanche effect about it is not good, and it has high possibility to suffer various attacks
Because of the characteristics and distinctive architecture of random-access memory (RAM) in the dedicated micro-controller, the source programs are first downloaded to the flash memory which could speed up the code execution

Summary

Introduction

In the traditional resource-constrained environment, the constrained devices such as nodes in wireless sensor networks and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags usually have the characteristics of weak computation ability, extremely small storage space, and strictly usage of power consumption [1,2,3]. According to the characteristics of the WIA-FA network, the security principles, which should be easy to deployment and use, extend battery life, and maximize the use of existing encryption and authentication technologies, are recommended Based on all these principles and facts of resource-constrained in practice, lightweight block ciphers are imminently needed to fulfil the security requirements. Based on this point of view, the performance and security are implemented and analyzed in this paper. 3.3.1 KLEIN KLEIN, which is a new family of lightweight block ciphers, is designed for highly resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags and wireless sensor networks. The output of the MixNibbles step will be the intermediate results for the round encryption process

LBlock

PRESENT

Piccolo

SIMON and SPECK

Results and discussions

Conclusions