### On the Efficiency of Software Implementations of Lightweight Block Ciphers from the Perspective of Programming Languages

Abdur Rehman Raza, Khawir Mahmood, Muhammad Faisal Amjad, Haider Abbas, and Mehreen Afzal

##### Abstract

Lightweight block ciphers are primarily designed for resource constrained devices. However, due to service requirements of large-scale IoT networks and systems, the need for efficient software implementations can not be ruled out. A number of studies have compared software implementations of different lightweight block ciphers on a specific platform but to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to benchmark various software implementations of a single lightweight block cipher across different programming languages and platforms in the cloud architecture. In this paper, we defined six lookup-table based software implementations for lightweight block ciphers with their characteristics ranging from memory to throughput optimized variants. We carried out a thorough analysis of the two costs associated with each implementation (memory and operations) and discussed possible trade-offs in detail. We coded all six types of implementations for three key settings (64, 80, 128 bits) of LED (a lightweight block cipher) in four programming languages (Java, C#, C++, Python). We highlighted the impact of choice relating to implementation type, programming language, and platform by benchmarking the seventy-two implementations for throughput and software efficiency on 32 & 64-bit platforms for two major operating systems (Windows & Linux) on Amazon Web Services Cloud. The results showed that these choices can affect the efficiency of a cryptographic primitive by a factor as high as 400.

Available format(s)
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Future Generation Computer Systems, issue 104 (March 2020): pages 43-59
DOI
10.1016/j.future.2019.09.058
Keywords
lightweight block-ciphersoftware implementationlookup tableLEDIoTaws EC2
Contact author(s)
raza abrehman @ gmail com
History
2019-10-17: revised
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2019/1218

CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/1218,
author = {Abdur Rehman Raza and Khawir Mahmood and Muhammad Faisal Amjad and Haider Abbas and Mehreen Afzal},
title = {On the Efficiency of Software Implementations of Lightweight Block Ciphers from the Perspective of Programming Languages},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2019/1218},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1016/j.future.2019.09.058},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1218}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1218}
}

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