Evaluation of SPN-Based Lightweight Crypto-Ciphers

Lightweight cryptography has recently emerged as a strong requirement for any highly constrained connected device; encryption/decryption processes must strike the balance between speed, area, power efficiency, and security robustness. The aim of this paper is to study the potential gains of the lightweight cryptography algorithms compared to the classic ones in hardware implementation. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as the standard, PRESENT and the very recently published GIFT are considered along with several optimized hardware versions of each one. Low- and high-security levels with 80- and 128-bit key length respectively are compared. They are all implemented on a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, exploiting different slice configurations to evaluate their performances. The results show the expected benefits in terms of throughput and area, which allows selecting the best lightweight crypto-ciphers depending on the target device or application. In addition, correlation power analysis is performed on each cipher to estimate their resistance against side-channel analysis.