Triathlon of Lightweight Block Ciphers for the Internet of Things

In this paper, we introduce a framework for the benchmarking of lightweight block ciphers on a multitude of embedded platforms. Our framework is able to evaluate the execution time, RAM footprint, as well as binary code size, and allows one to define a custom "figure of merit" according to which all evaluated candidates can be ranked. We used the framework to benchmark implementations of 19 lightweight ciphers, namely AES, Chaskey, Fantomas, HIGHT, LBlock, LEA, LED, Piccolo, PRESENT, PRIDE, PRINCE, RC5, RECTANGLE, RoadRunneR, Robin, Simon, SPARX, Speck, and TWINE, on three microcontroller platforms: 8-bit AVR, 16-bit MSP430, and 32-bit ARM. Our results bring some new insights into the question of how well these lightweight ciphers are suited to secure the Internet of things. The benchmarking framework provides cipher designers with an easy-to-use tool to compare new algorithms with the state of the art and allows standardization organizations to conduct a fair and consistent evaluation of a large number of candidates.