Title: Hardware implementations of LBlock and XXTEA lightweight block ciphers for resource-constrained IoT application

Authors: Apeksha Kamble; Zeesha Mishra; Bibhudendra Acharya

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Raipur, Chhattisgarh – 492010, India ' Department of Microelectronics and VLSI, UTD, Chhattisgarh Swami Vivekananda Technical University, Bhilai, Chhattisgarh – 491107, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Raipur, Chhattisgarh – 492010, India

Abstract: Recent growth in the number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a network has raised lot of security related issues. Since these devices are mostly battery powered, have low memory and weak computational capability, therefore lightweight ciphers are the most suitable choice for providing security. Among various lightweight ciphers available, we have chosen to implement corrected block TEA (XXTEA) and LBlock ciphers. These lightweight ciphers are feistel based, having simple encryption algorithms. In this work, two different architectures are proposed namely round-based implementation of LBlock cipher and serial implementation of XXTEA cipher with variable length message. Both the architectures are implemented on different field programmable gate array (FPGA) device families and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation is performed on 0.18 μm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. By analysing the performance metrics, comparison of the proposed work is done with the existing ciphers. For the proposed LBlock and XXTEA variable length architectures, the percentage improvement obtained with respect to area consumption is 50.92% and 26.04% respectively.

Keywords: IoT; Internet of Things; LWC; lightweight ciphers; LBlock; XXTEA; corrected block TEA; FPGA; field programmable gate array; ASIC; application-specific integrated circuit; block cipher.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2023.130223

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2023 Vol.11 No.3, pp.169 - 178

Received: 05 Sep 2022
Accepted: 28 Oct 2022
Published online: 06 Apr 2023 *

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