Triathlon of Lightweight Block Ciphers for the Internet of Things

In this paper we introduce an open framework for the benchmarking of lightweight block ciphers on a multitude of embedded platforms. Our framework is able to evaluate execution time, RAM footprint, as well as (binary) code size, and allows a user to define a custom “figure of merit” according to which all evaluated candidates can be ranked. We used the framework to benchmark various implementations of 13 lightweight ciphers, namely AES, Fantomas, HIGHT, LBlock, LED, Piccolo, PRESENT, PRINCE, RC5, Robin, Simon, Speck, and TWINE, on three different platforms: 8-bit ATmega, 16-bit MSP430, and 32-bit ARM. Our results give new insights to the question of how well these ciphers are suited to secure the Internet of Things (IoT). The benchmarking framework provides cipher designers with a tool to compare new algorithms with the state-of-the-art and allows standardization bodies to conduct a fair and comprehensive evaluation of a large number of candidates.