Lightweight Hardware Architectures for the Present Cipher in FPGA.

In recent years, the study of lightweight symmetric ciphers has gained interest due to the increasing demand for security services in constrained computing environments, such as in the Internet of Things. However, when there are several algorithms to choose from and different implementation criteria and conditions, it becomes hard to select the most adequate security primitive for a specific application. This paper discusses the hardware implementations of Present, a standardized lightweight cipher called to overcome part of the security issues in extremely constrained environments. The most representative realizations of this cipher are reviewed and two novel designs are presented. Using the same implementation conditions, the two new proposals and three state-of-the-art designs are evaluated and compared, using area, performance, energy, and efficiency as metrics. From this wide experimental evaluation, to the best of our knowledge, new records are obtained in terms of implementation size and energy consumption. In particular, our designs result to be adequate in regards to energy-per-bit and throughput-per-slice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]