Performance Evaluation of Contemporary Block Ciphers for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is paving its way into every aspect of human life. It makes the conventional processes smart and enables them to be completed quickly. Data is of paramount importance in IoT as it is critical for business progression. The security of such data is also crucial to prevent data breaches and loss of privacy. One of the common way to implement data security is Cryptography. Performance evaluation of ciphers like DES, 3DES, AES, Blowfish and Twofish is carried out. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of existing popular ciphers rather than selecting Light Weight Cryptography (LWC) algorithms which are yet to be properly evaluated for their security. A powerful desktop PC and a Raspberry Pi with limited resources that can be considered as a high-end IoT device are selected for evaluating the selected ciphers. From the results, it is observed that Twofish performs better on IoT devices for smaller amounts of data, and it is also memory efficient than other evaluated ciphers. AES and Twofish performed better than other algorithms for various data input sizes. The results of this evaluation will be helpful for IoT architects in making decisions over the required cipher for securing the data in an IoT application.