Title: Flexible and area-optimised hardware architectures of LEA block cipher for IoT applications

Authors: Kella Chaitanya; Zeesha Mishra; Pulkit Singh; Bibhudendra Acharya

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Raipur, Raipur, 492010, Chhattisgarh, India ' Department of Computer Science Engineering, NIIT University, Neemrana, Neemrana, 301705, Rajasthan, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur, Chennai, 603203, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Raipur, Raipur, 492010, Chhattisgarh, India

Abstract: Information security and privacy are indispensable aspects of Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber physical system technologies as sensitive data is being transmitted in many applications. They are restricted in terms of resources like memory, computing power, etc. Lightweight cryptography delivers solutions by providing sufficient security and using minimal resources. Many lightweight ciphers have been proposed over the years for a variety of applications. This paper proposes three flexible and area-optimised lightweight encryption algorithm (LEA) block cipher hardware architectures that guarantee appropriate speed and security. These flexible serial architectures are designed to handle all three key sizes of LEA cipher, i.e., 128, 192, and 256 bits. The proposed architectures are implemented at the RTL level using Verilog in Xilinx ISE on different families of field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. The proposed architectures are designed to render better throughput rates at much lesser areas.

Keywords: lightweight cryptography; IoT; Internet of Things; LEA block cipher; flexible architecture; throughput; FPGA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2024.145714

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2024 Vol.12 No.1, pp.33 - 45

Received: 07 Oct 2024
Accepted: 03 Nov 2024
Published online: 16 Apr 2025 *

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