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

Author: S. Rinne, T. Eisenbarth, C. Paar

Description: 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 significantly less memory than the AES.

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@INCOLLECTION{speed2007 author = {S. Rinne, T. Eisenbarth, C. Paar}, title = {{Performance Analysis of Contemporary Light-Weight Block Ciphers on 8-bit Microcontrollers}}, booktitle = {ecrypt workshop SPEED - Software Performance Enhancement for Encryption and Decryption}, publisher = {-}, year = {2007}, }

Related Tags: VHDL, lightweight, Assembly, ASIC

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Enabling Full-Size Public-Key Algorithms on 8-bit Sensor Nodes

Author: L. Uhsadel, A. Poschmann, C. Paar

Description: In this article we present the fastest known implementation of a modular multiplication for a 160-bit standard compliant elliptic curve (secp160r1) for 8-bit micro controller which are typically used in WSNs. The major part (77%) of the processing time for an elliptic curve operation such as ECDSA or EC Diffie-Hellman is spent on modular multiplication. We present an optimized arithmetic algorithm which signicantly speed up ECC schemes. The reduced processing time also yields a signicantly lower energy consumption of ECC schemes. With our implementation results we can show that a 160-bit modular multiplication can be performed in 0.39 ms on an 8-bit AVR processor clocked at 7.37 MHz. This brings the vision of asymmetric cryptography in the eld of WSNs with all its benets for key-distribution and authentication a step closer to reality.

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@INCOLLECTION{ecc-esas2007 author = {L. Uhsadel, A. Poschmann, C. Paar}, title = {{Enabling Full-Size Public-Key Algorithms on 8-bit Sensor Nodes}}, booktitle = {Proceedings of ESAS 2007}, publisher = {Springer-Verlag}, year = {2007}, }

Related Tags: lightweight, Assembly, crypto, embedded

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