Compact Implementations of HIGHT Block Cipher on IoT Platforms

Recent lightweight block cipher competition (FELICS Triathlon) evaluates efficient implementations of block ciphers for Internet of things (IoT) environment. In the competition, the implementation of HIGHT block cipher achieved the most efficient lightweight block cipher, in terms of code size (ROM), memory (RAM), and execution time. In this paper, we further investigate lightweight features of HIGHT block cipher and present the optimized implementations of both software and hardware for low-end IoT platforms, including resource-constrained devices (8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). By using proposed optimization methods, the implemented HIGHT block cipher shows better performance compared to previous state-of-the-art implementations.