Evaluation of Lightweight Block Ciphers Based on General Feistel Structure (GFS)

Abstract

Recently, lightweight block cipher has become a hot topic, which is a key technology to ensure the security of communications among constrained devices such as WSNs, RFID, and IoT. Therefore, hundreds of lightweight block ciphers have been proposed. The architecture of these ciphers is influenced by the balance between protection, efficiency, and costs. Therefore, efficient evaluation methods should be established. This paper outlines the performance analysis of three generalized Feistel lightweight block crypto ciphers - CLEFIA, PICCOLO, and TWINE. Various benchmark parameters, such as area, throughput, and power, need to be considered to analyze such algorithms. The algorithms are also tested for various key and plaintext sizes. This comparison sets the base for other algorithms to be tested and evaluated.  It also encourages the researchers to look after different lightweight algorithms that could be utilized the best in certain applications instead of generalizing their purposes. Moreover, it shows the performance of the selected algorithms on Hardware, where most of the proposed algorithms are examined on software only.