A survey on lightweight block ciphers for low-resource devices: Comparative study and open issues

This paper investigates the lightweight block ciphers׳ implementations, which have received a fair amount of research for their essential security role in low-resource devices. Our objective is to present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research progress in lightweight block ciphers׳ implementation and highlight future research directions. At first, we present taxonomy of the cipher design space and accurately define the scope of lightweight ciphers for low-resource devices. Moreover, this paper discusses the performance metrics that are commonly reported in the literature when comparing cipher implementations. The sources of inaccuracies and deviations are carefully examined. In order to mitigate the confusion in the composite metrics, we developed a general metric which includes the basic metrics. Our analysis designated the energy/bit metric as the most appropriate metric for energy-constrained low-resource designs. Afterwards, the software and hardware implementations of the block cipher algorithms are surveyed, investigated, and compared. The paper selects the top performing ciphers in various metrics and suggests the Present cipher as a good reference for hardware implementations. What transpires from this survey is that unresolved research questions and issues are yet to be addressed by future research projects.