Performance Analysis of Contemporary Light-Weight Block Ciphers on 8-bit Microcontrollers

This work pres­ents a per­for­mance ana­ly­sis of soft­ware im­ple­men­ta­ti­ons of ciph­ers that are spe­ci­al­ly de­si­gned for the do­main of ubi­qui­tous com­pu­ting. The ana­ly­sis fo­cu­ses on the spe­cial pro­per­ties of em­bed­ded de­vices that need to be taken into ac­count like cost (given by me­mo­ry con­sump­ti­on) and en­er­gy re­qui­re­ments. The di­s­cus­sed ciph­ers in­clu­de DESL, HIGHT, SEA, and TEA/XTEA. As­sem­bler im­ple­men­ta­ti­ons of the ciph­ers for an 8-bit AVR micro­con­trol­ler plat­form were ana­ly­zed and com­pa­red with a byte-ori­en­ted AES im­ple­men­ta­ti­on. While all ciph­ers fail to out­per­form AES on the di­s­cus­sed 8-bit plat­form, TEA/XTEA and SEA at least con­su­me signi?cant­ly less me­mo­ry than the AES.