WG-8: A Lightweight Stream Cipher for Resource-Constrained Smart Devices

Lightweight cryptographic primitives are essential for securing pervasive embedded devices like RFID tags, smart cards, and wireless sensor nodes. In this paper, we present a lightweight stream cipher WG-8, which is tailored from the well-known Welch-Gong (WG) stream cipher family, for resource-constrained devices. WG-8 inherits the good randomness and cryptographic properties of the WG stream cipher family and is resistant to the most common attacks against stream ciphers. The software implementations of the WG-8 stream cipher on two popular low-power microcontrollers as well as the extensive comparison with other lightweight cryptography implementations highlight that in the context of securing lightweight embedded applications WG-8 has favorable performance and low energy consumption.