A Survey on Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is challenging the conventional design targets for integrated systems such as energy efficiency, cost, noise, and performance. With the prospected proliferation of IoT devices with 5G networks, ensuring safe margins for these design targets will become even more crucial due to the limited battery life and significant physical constraints. Additionally, IoT devices are quite vulnerable to hardware attacks since they are typically more accessible to an attacker as compared to the other general purpose computing devices. The limitations, when combined with the cost constraints make the design of security measures for the IoT devices quite challenging. Regardless of these constraints, IoT devices still need to perform a certain level of secure computation by utilizing encryption algorithms. Subsequently, new specific cryptographic algorithms designed and developed to be adequate for implementation in resource-constrained devices such as RFID systems, smart card, and wireless sensor networks known as lightweight cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, a survey is conducted to compare between selected lightweight cryptographic algorithms. There are two types of lightweight cryptography algorithms know as block ciphers and stream ciphers, both are presented in this paper. Their security features and performances of hardware implementations are also analyzed.