Dietary Recommendations for Lightweight Block Ciphers: Power, Energy and Area Analysis of Recently Developed Architectur

In this paper we perform a comprehensive area, power, and energy analysis of some of the most recently-developed lightweight block ciphers and we compare them to the standard AES algorithm. We do this for several different architectures of the considered

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Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected] 2 ESAT/COSIC, KU Leuven and iMinds, Leuven, Belgium Horst G¨ ortz Institute for IT-Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany 4 ACRO/ES&S, Katholieke Hogeschool Limburg, Diepenbeek, Belgium

Abstract. In this paper we perform a comprehensive area, power, and energy analysis of some of the most recently-developed lightweight block ciphers and we compare them to the standard AES algorithm. We do this for several different architectures of the considered block ciphers. Our evaluation method consists of estimating the pre-layout power consumption and the derived energy using Cadence Encounter RTL Compiler and ModelSIM simulations. We show that the area is not always correlated to the power and energy consumption, which is of importance for mobile battery-fed devices. As a result, this paper can be used to make a choice of architecture when the algorithm has already been fixed; or it can help deciding which algorithm to choose based on energy and key/block length requirements.

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Introduction

In the past decade various proposals for “lightweight” symmetric ciphers have been made. Among more carefully investigated ones are Clefia [20], HIGHT [21], KATAN [4], mCrypton [22], and PRESENT [3]. This turned into a very active area of research as evident by several algorithms proposed over the course of the past two years, including KLEIN [18], LED [1], Piccolo [2] and PRINCE [16]. The dominant metric used in the majority of the proposals has been the number of gate equivalence, or GE, needed for realizing the cipher in hardware. This number is derived by dividing the silicon area used for a cipher with a given standard-cell library by the area of a two-input NAND gate. Hence, the popular gate equivalence count can be thought of as a normalized area measure. Even though helpful, the metric does not answer all questions regarding lightweight ciphers. The purpose of the investigation at hand is to perform a comprehensive area, power, and energy analysis of some of the most recently-developed lightweight M. Hutter and J.-M. Schmidt (Eds.): RFIDsec 2013, LNCS 8262, pp. 103–112, 2013. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-41332-2 7, c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 

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block ciphers along with the well-known block ciphers, which can be helpful for both the engineering and theoretical communities concerned with lightweight cryptography. Given that lightweight algorithms are particularly interesting for battery-powered or passive systems such as RFID tags, a valid energy prediction is very desirable. In the most recent work of Kerckhoff et al. [15], the area, power consumption, throughput and energy of 6 block ciphers are evaluated. Conclusions are drawn with respect to round unrolling, parallelism and pipelining. The paper at hand covers 11 lightweight block cipher architectures (of 7 different lightweight block ciphers) and 6 different AES architectures. The differences between the AES architecture