Assessment of Radiation-Induced Soft Errors on Lightweight Cryptography Algorithms Running on a Resource-Constrained Device

Most safety-critical edge-computing devices rely on lightweight cryptography (LWC) algorithms to provide security at minimum power and performance overhead. LWC algorithms are traditionally embedded as a hardware component, but with the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), emerging firmware is more likely to support cryptography algorithms to comply with different security levels and industry standards. This is the first work to present the soft error assessment of five cryptography algorithms executing in a low-power microprocessor running under neutron radiation, considering electronic code book (ECB) and counter (CTR) mode of operation implementations. Results obtained from two neutron radiation tests suggest that: 1) the NOEKEON algorithm gives the best relative soft error reliability, performance, power efficiency, and memory footprint utilization tradeoffs between the five algorithms considering both ECB and CTR implementations and 2) cryptography solutions based on the CTR mode of operation present better FIT rate for silent data corruption (SDC) and crash with respect to ECB implementations.