Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/847
Exploring Energy Efficiency of Lightweight Block Ciphers
Subhadeep Banik and Andrey Bogdanov and Francesco Regazzoni
Abstract: In the last few years, the field of lightweight cryptography
has seen an influx in the number of block ciphers and hash functions
being proposed. One of the metrics that define a good lightweight design is the energy consumed per unit operation of the algorithm. For block ciphers, this operation is the encryption of one plaintext. By studying the energy consumption model of a CMOS gate, we arrive at the conclusion that the total energy consumed during the encryption operation of an r-round unrolled architecture of any block cipher is a quadratic function in r. We then apply our model to 9 well known lightweight block ciphers, and thereby try to predict the optimal value of r at which an r-round unrolled architecture for a cipher is likely to be most energy efficient. We also try to relate our results to some physical design parameters like the signal delay across a round and algorithmic parameters like the number of rounds taken to achieve full diffusion of a difference in the plaintext/key.
Category / Keywords: implementation / AES, Lightweight Block Cipher, Low Power/Energy Circuits
Original Publication (with minor differences): Selected Areas in Cryptography 2015
Date: received 1 Sep 2015
Contact author: subb at dtu dk
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Version: 20150902:132517 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2015/847
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