Running head: LIGHTWEIGHT CRYPTOGRAPHY

Lightweight cryptography

Name

Institution
LIGHTWEIGHT CRYPTOGRAPHY

Introduction

Cryptography refers to the process that involves a combination of the decryption and

encryption according to Andreeva, [1]. The process encompasses a plain text information being

converted into cipher text or unintelligible text and then back to the plain text. However, when a

combination of security and lightweight is considered, the process is known as lightweight

cryptography. The high levels of security are achieved using lightweight cryptography by using

only a small computing power [1]. The other notable definition of the lightweight cryptography

is a cryptographic protocol or algorithm tailored for implementation and use in the constrained

environments including the sensors, RFID tags, healthcare devices, contactless smart cards, etc.

The purpose of the lightweight cryptography is to allow a diverse range of modern

applications such as vehicle security systems, smart meters, wireless patient monitoring systems,

the internet of things and the Intelligent Transport systems to perform their respective duties with

relative ease. A wide variety of devices are helped using the lightweight cryptography which can

be implemented in various kinds of software and hardware [2].

Various features are available that assist the lightweight cryptography work optimally.

The features include the stream ciphers, the block ciphers, hash functions and so on. The

contribution of the lightweight cryptography to the security of various smart devices and objects

include its smaller footprint and efficiency [2]. The networks being used should be implemented

more primitively in combination with the lightweight primitives.

The internet of things uses a wide range of lightweight cryptography techniques. A high

number of challenges are faced by the internet of things such as the power, privacy, security,

heterogeneity, scalability, and bandwidth. The main reasons for the adoption of lightweight

cryptography are the applicability to devices having lower resources and the efficiency of the
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end-to-end communication. All the benefits of the lightweight cryptography will only be realized

when the lightweight cryptography is standardized. The resource constrained devices such as the

internet of things use the lightweight encryption sector.

The paper is organized as follows. There is a bit of introduction to the lightweight

cryptography and its goals. The paper describes the potential security threats in a system using

the low powered devices and the working mechanism of the lightweight cryptography. The

performance metric of the lightweight cryptographic is analyzed in both hardware and software

performance metric. Two different lightweight cryptographic algorithms have been discussed

using details from the current literature. The existing and future challenges that face the

lightweight cryptographic shall be discussed and vivid conclusions made henceforth.

Security threats

Devices using the internet of things are constrained on the amount of energy they can use.

Such devices include RFID tags, wireless sensors, machine-to-machine microcontrollers (M2M)

and NFC tags. Cryptography is important for these devices to ensure they are fully secured and

will provide fast identification, data protection, and authentication. However, because of their

low-level usage of energy, many advantages have been confined to applicability and design and

a source of unique challenges in security.

The smaller size of the low-end energy devices regarding ROM and ROM presents a

greater security challenge. The small products such as fitness trackers, smart lighting, tire

pressure monitoring sensors, and smart watches are designed to have the smallest amount of

possible profile to satisfy the engineering and marketing needs. The devices have very little

ROM and RAM available for cryptography. Solutions for these steps still exist.
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Network attacks exist in various ways such as the attacker sniffing out the confidential

information and other types of data that flows through the RFID technologies because of the

wireless characteristics. The attacker will try to access some information from inside the

organization using the port scanning and the sniffing applications.

Working mechanism

Lightweight cryptography is an important developing and attractive public key

cryptosystem that is applied to many different kinds of devices. The lightweight cryptography is

normally applied if the device cannot undertake enough cryptographic operations to ensure

adequate security. The lightweight cryptographic accommodates different kinds of limitations

related to the resource constrained environment of a lot of new application generations according

to Maimut & Ouafi (2012) [4].

The process of communication can be wireless or wired. The devices that are wireless are

powered using a battery or an electromagnetic induction. The battery being used can be

rechargeable or disposable. The power consumption or energy in some applications can be very

important, but other types of applications are just okay with low latency levels. The factors that

make the process quite limiting is the fact that the software code size or the hardware area can be

small and a very small amount of RAM can be available.

Performance metrics

The implementation for metrics in both the software and hardware are not identical

because of the cipher complexities during its operation. The bit permutation implementation

offers expensive software, but it is relatively easy to implement if we are dealing with hardware.

The look up tables is easy to be set up in software and very difficult and tough when it comes to

hardware devices.
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Software performance metrics

The amount of data gathered in RAM is measured regarding the size of the tool and the

implemented information type. It contains private RAM data such as master keys, ciphered data,

initialization vectors, and round keys. The price of the microcontrollers depends on memory and

from the evidence collected from the block cipher it only needs small lower usage of the memory

Andreeva & Bilgin [1]. It has more limited hardware resource than the computers and meeting

the block cipher data memory requirements forms the main part of the microcontrollers. The

code footprint that is stored in the flash memory of the microcontroller controls the size

requirement of the microcontroller that is computed in bytes and corresponds to the footprint

code according to Shemaili & Yeun, [7]. The object files created by the compiler is used to

adjust several implementations of the block cipher size tool and the object file made by the

compiler to determine the ROM or the code size of the software Beaulieu, [2]. The execution

time of the forms the best performance metric of the software. The execution time is related to

other factors such as target device, the number of rounds and the structure of the cipher. The time

of the execution is obtained from the processor cycles commanded by a set of instructions to be

executed. The number of cycles in the processor clock is used to find the number of processor

cycles obtained from the basic cipher operations.

Hardware performance metric

The resources needed for the implementation and design of the hardware are generally

expressed concerning full custom ASIC/FPGA and gate area. In FPGA, the design provided

works towards increasing flexibility and minimizing the development costs. It contains the flip-

flops, look-up tables, and multiplexers. On the contrary, the ASIC customized design is based on

the automated design flow that reduces the design time according to Gupta & Ray 2013 [3].
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Types

The three main types of the cryptographic algorithm include a public key, secret key, and

hash functions. The lightweight block cipher has smaller block sizes, simpler rounds, simpler key

schedules, and smaller key sizes. The lightweight hash functions have smaller message sizes and

smaller output size McKay,2017 [5]. The high-performance system has a customized CPU,

Crypto multicore, crypto array, and crypto processor. For example, the data encryption standards

(DES) uses the same key type to decrypt and encrypt a message and hence the receiver, and the

sender must use and know the same private key. The DES is described as being a block cipher

since they use the same kind of 64 bits size plain text blocks and returns the cipher text block of

the same type. The permutation type also called the “2x64th power) leads to possible

arrangements of the 64 bits that can either be 1 or 0. The 64 bits block is further divided into two

other blocks of 32 bits each, a right half R and the left half block L. Using the key size of the 56

size of block, operating on 64 bits block that are stored using the 64 bits long key and hence no

8th bit key was used such as the 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, and 64. The DES works using the

binary numbers or bits of 1s and 0s that are normally used in digital computers. The four bits

group make up the hexadecimal or base 16 number. The binary number 0001 is treated similarly

to the hexadecimal number 1 binary. 1000 is the same as the hexadecimal number 8. 1001 is

equal to the nine hexadecimal number and 1010 same to hexadecimal number 1010 while 1111

is equal to the F hexadecimal number Manifavas, 2014 [5].

Challenges

The cycle count has very few iterations having a slower simple functions. The block

cipher is developed independently in the past up to 2012. The existing technologies are

implemented differently, and very few comparative studies have been carried out because of
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reduced competition and lack of standardization. The criteria used during the evaluation is

mostly relative and reflect algorithmically and choices of implementation but some have their

algorithm reflected in a better way. With fixed parameters, the interpretation has become easier

concerning issues of comparisons Matsuda & Moriai, 2012 [6]. The designer skills also impact

on the extent of comparison. The comparison of software is relatively easy to read and interpret

because of the fixed hardware including cycle count tradeoff and limited code size. The RAM

used reflects the key and state size that is applicable.

Conclusion

The paper has explained the lightweight cryptography in detail. The low resource devices

undertake their computations using the IoT environment. The devices are affected by factors

such as power functions, battery life, memory, and computation. Some algorithm is vulnerable to

certain kinds of attacks than others, and hence a more secure and lightweight encryption

algorithm needs to be developed. It needs to have a higher processing speed, smaller key size,

and less power computation. The requirement for lightweight cipher implies that the existing

candidates are not good enough for gate count and area. The process involving algorithm change

is quite expensive, and the impact on performance will be greatly reduced and overall

nonnegligible compared to the application of the scaling technology. Hence though we need new

ciphers, they should bring with them new perspectives regarding properties and designs

techniques.
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Reference

1. Andreeva, E., Bilgin, B., Bogdanov, A., Luykx, A., Mennink, B., Mouha, N., &
Yasuda, K. (2014, March). APE: authenticated permutation-based encryption for
lightweight cryptography. In International Workshop on Fast Software
Encryption (pp. 168-186). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

2. Beaulieu, R., Treatman-Clark, S., Shors, D., Weeks, B., Smith, J., & Wingers, L.
(2015, June). The SIMON and SPECK lightweight block ciphers. In Design
Automation Conference (DAC), 2015 52nd ACM/EDAC/IEEE (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

3. Gupta, K. C., & Ray, I. G. (2013, September). On constructions of MDS matrices

4. Maimut, D., & Ouafi, K. (2012). Lightweight cryptography for RFID tags. IEEE
Security & Privacy, 10(2), 76-79.

5. Manifavas, C., Hatzivasilis, G., Fysarakis, K., & Rantos, K. (2014). Lightweight
cryptography for embedded systems–A comparative analysis. In Data Privacy
Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security (pp. 333-349). Springer,
Berlin, Heidelberg.

6. Matsuda, S., & Moriai, S. (2012, September). Lightweight cryptography for the
cloud: exploit the power of bitslice implementation. In International Workshop
on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (pp. 408-425). Springer,
Berlin, Heidelberg.

7. McKay, K. A., McKay, K. A., Bassham, L., Turan, M. S., & Mouha, N.
(2017). Report on lightweight cryptography. US Department of Commerce,
National Institute of Standards and Technology.

8. Shemaili, M. B., Yeun, C. Y., Mubarak, K., & Zemerly, M. J. (2012, December).
A new lightweight hybrid cryptographic algorithm for the internet of things.
In Internet Technology And Secured Transactions, 2012 International Conference
for (pp. 87-92). IEEE.