Title: Performance optimised architectures of lightweight HIGHT cipher for low-resource IoT applications

Authors: Gandu Ramu; 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: A major concern in many data-sensitive applications of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms is the security and privacy. The execution-speed, ability to adapt, and processing capacity of IoT systems are limited. Various encryption techniques have been proposed recently to ensure the security of IoTs communication. In this paper, different architectures of HIGHT lightweight block cipher are implemented on the different family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in which round-based has a smaller number of flip-flops, high-speed architecture has good throughput. In addition, serial RAM-based design has low power consumption and low area consumption of 0.572 W and 34, respectively. Moreover, combined encryption/decryption architecture consumes resources of flip-flop 197, slices of 151, LUTs of 502, and frequency of 249 MHz. The percentage improvement in the area over the previous work is around 135% and 97% in maximum operating frequency, respectively. The results of hardware design are thoroughly evaluated and compared to the most relevant lightweight block ciphers.

Keywords: lightweight cryptography; block ciphers; FPGA; field programmable gate array; ARX operations; Feistel structures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2024.145722

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2024 Vol.12 No.1, pp.46 - 59

Received: 16 Aug 2024
Accepted: 08 Feb 2025
Published online: 16 Apr 2025 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article