Performance evaluation and design considerations of lightweight block cipher for low-cost embedded devices

In this paper we present the design considerations of lightweight encryption algorithm. Our aim is to demonstrate how to achieve lightweight block ciphers efficient software performance for low-resource embedded devices. Several lightweight block ciphers are proposed; we selected the most recent and suitable for low-resource embedded systems such as RFID tags. In this work, we analyzed the software implementation of lightweight block ciphers using FELICS (Fair Evaluation of Lightweight Cryptographic Systems) a benchmarking framework which computes execution time, RAM consumption and ROM occupation on two largely used devices: 8-bit AVR microcontroller and 16-bit MSP microcontroller. Using the same evaluation conditions, we selected the most suitable ciphers for low-resource devices.