High Speed Enhanced Pipeline Architecture of LEA Light Weight Cipher for Resource Limited Applications

Due to advancement in computing power and technology specifically in the cyber-security domain, need for data security has increased. For such requirements cryptography plays an important role in securely transferring data on the internet. But when it comes to IoT devices, this need for data security increases further. For this lightweight cryptography provides means for resource-limited devices as most IoT devices are resource-constrained. These devices inherently bring additional limitations of trade-off between area, security, and speed of operation. In many applications, area increase can be acceptable if increases in frequency of operation is needed. This paper proposes such a design that provides higher speed. The LEA cipher when compared to other LWCs has inherently smaller code size, smaller memory-footprint and spend less power. LEA is a lightweight crypto-algorithm that takes in 128bit of data and 128/192/256 bit of key for encryption of the data. A pipelined architecture is proposed that reduces the critical path delay to increase the frequency of operation. Pipelining registers reduce the critical path delay. This design gives better results than existing 192-bit key pipelined architectures of LEA and other lightweight cipher with some area tradeoff.