Energy evaluation of software implementations of block ciphers under memory constraints

Software implementations of modern block ciphers often require large lookup tables along with code size increasing optimizations like loop unrolling to reach peak performance on general-purpose processors. Therefore, block ciphers are difficult to implement efficiently on embedded devices like cell phones or sensor nodes where run-time memory and program ROM are scarce resources. In this paper we analyze and compare the performance, energy consumption, runtime memory requirements, and code size of the five block ciphers RC6, Rijndael, Serpent, Twofish, and XTEA on the StrongARM SA-1100 processor. Most previous evaluations of block ciphers considered performance as the sole metric of interest and did not care about memory requirements or code size. In contrast to previous work, our study of the performance and energy characteristics of block ciphers has been conducted with “lightweight” implementations which restrict the size of lookup tables to 1 kB and also impose constraints o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Johann Großschädl, Stefan Tillich, Christian Rechberger, Michael Hofmann, Marcel Medwed
• Keywords: Block Cipher, Code Size, DATE 2007, Hardware, Modern Block Ciphers