Citation:
El-hajj, M.; Mousawi, H.;
Fadlallah, A. Analysis of Lightweight
Cryptographic Algorithms on IoT
Hardware Platform. Future Internet
2023
, 15, 54. https://doi.org/
10.3390/fi15020054
Academic Editor: Paolo Bellavista
Received: 13 January 2023
Revised: 20 January 2023
Accepted: 25 January 2023
Published: 30 January 2023
Copyright:
© 2023 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
future internet
Article
Analysis of Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms on IoT
Hardware Platform
†
Mohammed El-hajj
1,
*
,‡
, Hussien Mousawi
2,‡
and Ahmad Fadlallah
3,‡
1
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente,
7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
2
Faculty of Engineering, Lebanese University, Beirut 1533, Lebanon
3
Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Sciences and Arts in Lebanon, Beirut 1002, Lebanon
*
Correspondence: m.elhajj@utwente.nl
†
This paper is an extended version of the conference paper.
‡
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract:
Highly constrained devices that are interconnected and interact to complete a task are being
used in a diverse range of new fields. The Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems, distributed
control systems, vehicular systems, wireless sensor networks, tele-medicine, and the smart grid are
a few examples of these fields. In any of these contexts, security and privacy might be essential
aspects. Research on secure communication in Internet of Things (IoT) networks is a highly contested
topic. One method for ensuring secure data transmission is cryptography. Because IoT devices
have limited resources, such as power, memory, and batteries, IoT networks have boosted the term
“lightweight cryptography”. Algorithms for lightweight cryptography are designed to efficiently
protect data while using minimal resources. In this research, we evaluated and benchmarked
lightweight symmetric ciphers for resource-constrained devices. The evaluation is performed using
two widely used platform: Arduino and Raspberry Pi. In the first part, we implemented 39 block
ciphers on an ATMEGA328p microcontroller and analyzed them in the terms of speed, cost, and
energy efficiency during encryption and decryption for different block and key sizes. In the second
part, the 2nd-round NIST candidates (80 stream and block cipher algorithms) were added to the
first-part ciphers in a comprehensive analysis for equivalent block and key sizes in the terms of
latency and energy efficiency.
