A survey on software implementation of lightweight block ciphers for IoT devices

Internet of things (IoT) is a computing concept that illustrates how things are connected to the internet and can communicate with other things. IoT consists of masses of physical devices with limited resources to be in touch with each other without human interaction. This massive number of devices with limited resources introduces security challenges, such as authorization and authentication of the devices, ensuring data privacy and integrity, detecting and managing vulnerabilities, etc. This paper presents background about lightweight block ciphers used as a security technique to protect transmitted information within the network. More specially, we examine lightweight block cipher implementations in a software platform on 8-bit architecture. To analyze the performance of block ciphers, we have selected the most popular 50 lightweight block ciphers on IoT platforms based on the energy and memory consumption, throughput, and execution time with various key sizes and fixed message length. After analyzing every single lightweight block cipher, a category-based evaluation was also made. The presented study helps IoT designers decide on and compares lightweight block ciphers on a specified platform with a broad range of implementations.