A comparative study of hardware architectures for lightweight block ciphers

A hardware-based performance comparison of lightweight block ciphers is conducted in this paper. The DESL, DESXL, CURUPIRA-1, CURUPIRA-2, HIGHT, PUFFIN, PRESENT and XTEA block ciphers have been employed in this comparison. Our objective is to survey what ciphers are suitable for security in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other security applications with demanding area restrictions. A general architecture option has been followed for the implementation of all ciphers. Specifically, a loop architecture has been used, where one basic round is used iteratively. The basic performance metrics are the area, power consumption and hardware resource cost associated with the implementation resulting throughput of each cipher. The most compact cipher is the 80-bit PRESENT block cipher with a count of 1704 GEs and 206.4 Kbps, while the largest in area cipher is the CURUPIRA-1. The CURUPIRA-1 cipher consumes the highest power of 118.1 μW, while the PRESENT cipher consumes the lowest power of 20 μW. All measurements have been taken at a 100 kHz clock frequency.