Towards green cryptography: a comparison of lightweight ciphers from the energy viewpoint

Authors:
Stéphanie Kerckhof;François Durvaux;Cédric Hocquet;David Bol;François-Xavier Standaert
Affiliations:
Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, Crypto Group., Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, Crypto Group., Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, Crypto Group., Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, Crypto Group., Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, Crypto Group., Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Venue:
CHES'12 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
Year:
2012

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Abstract

We provide a comprehensive evaluation of several lightweight block ciphers with respect to various hardware performance metrics, with a particular focus on the energy cost. This case study serves as a background for discussing general issues related to the relative nature of hardware implementations comparisons. We also use it to extract intuitive observations for new algorithm designs. Implementation results show that the most significant differences between lightweight ciphers are observed when considering both encryption and decryption architectures, and the impact of key scheduling algorithms. Yet, these differences are moderated when looking at their amplitude, and comparing them with the impact of physical parameters tuning, e.g. frequency / voltage scaling.