Performance Comparison of Software-Efficient Implementations of the PRESENT Block Cypher

PRESENT is one of the first standard hardware efficient, ultra-lightweight block cyphers designed to secure highly resource-constrained devices. The 4x4 s-boxes and 64-bit permutations provide an optimum level of confusion and diffusion in the cypher. The bitwise permutation involving the rerouting of wires provides faster diffusion in hardware, however, it is far from being an optimal choice to achieve good performance in software. Even though the 4-bit PRESENT s-box requires a small amount of memory to store the pre-defined s-box table, the overall efficiency of a block cypher is determined by both the linear and non-linear strategies used in the design. In this paper, three software techniques for implementing the PRESENT block cypher, namely direct, wide-table and combined wide-table, are being analysed and compared in KEIL MDK IDE and ARM Cortex-M3-based LPC1768 IoT development platform. The techniques have been evaluated for execution time, code footprint, and power and energy consumption. Therefore, this paper helps the designers to select the best software efficient technique as per their application use case.