Paper 2021/476

Revisiting Lightweight Block Ciphers: Review, Taxonomy and Future directions

Aaqib Bashir Dar, Mashhood Jeelani Lone, and Nuzhat Hussain

Abstract

Block ciphers have been extremely predominant in the area of cryptography and due to the paradigm shift towards devices of resource constrained nature, lightweight block ciphers have totally influenced the field and has been a go-to option ever since. The growth of resource constrained devices have put forth a dire need for the security solutions that are feasible in terms of resources without taking a toll on the security that they offer. As the world is starting to move towards Internet of Things (IoT), data security and privacy in this environment is a major concern. This is due to the reason that a huge number of devices that operate in this environment are resource constrained. Because of their resource-constrained nature, advanced mainstream cryptographic ciphers and techniques do not perform as efficiently on such devices. This has led to the boom in the field of 'lightweight cryptography' which aims at developing cryptographic techniques that perform efficiently in a resource constrained environment. Over the period of past two decades or so, a bulk of lightweight block ciphers have been proposed due to the growing need and demand in lightweight cryptography. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art lightweight block ciphers, present a comprehensive design niche, give a detailed taxonomy with multiple classifications and present future research directions.