Performance-efficient flexible architecture of m–Crypton cipher for resource-constrained applications

Some traditional cryptographic techniques, like the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256 for hashing), Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA/Elliptic Curve for signing) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES for encryption), perform well on systems with good hardware memory and processing capabilities. However, these techniques engage in conflict to keep up with the world of sensor networks and embedded systems. Lightweight cryptography plays a major role in security constraints, especially in resource-limited devices such as RFID tags, smart cards, sensor nodes and IoT. This paper proposes a flexible hardware architecture of lightweight m-Crypton block cipher for high-speed resource-constrained applications. The proposed architecture enables a single architecture appropriate for the many encryptions' key sizes. Therefore, the proposed architecture changes the security level in resource-constrained applications by integrating several key sizes into a single design. Furthermore, this architecture outperformed the conventional block ciphers in terms of throughput-to-area ratio achieving a 10.37 throughput-to-area ratio better than other lightweight block ciphers. The proposed design can be used in high bandwidth applications, high-end RFID and IoT smart devices. Hence, the proposed design demonstrates that increasing the speed of cipher implementation results in more plaintext transformations into ciphertext. All results have been verified and simulated for several Xilinx design suite families.