AES-8: A Lightweight AES for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is marked by resource-constrained devices. Information security is the main challenge that arises due to the wireless transmission of data by ubiquitous sensors. In this work, we have presented a lightweight advance encryption scheme (AES) that can be used in small IoT devices. Galois field arithmetic has been used to minimize the size of the S-box. Slice consumption and throughput are two contradictory parameters in AES design. The design tries to achieve a tradeoff between these two parameters. With a separate S-box for the key expansion, a high throughput in the range of 52–163 Mbps has been achieved on different FPGAs. In terms of throughput, it matches the latest lightweight designs and outperforms older ones. It occupies 73 slices on an Artix-7 FPGA. When compared to existing AES designs, the design achieves area savings in the range of 4%–78.33%. In slice consumption, it is on par with most of the lightweight ciphers designed for IoT. The most remarkable feature of the design is its efficiency. It outperforms existing lightweight AES variants with a typical throughput per slice of 210 kbps/slice to 1.409 Mbps/slice. On Virtex-5, AES-8 has outperformed lightweight ciphers like Shadow-64, LEA-128, DULBC-80/128, and QARMA. A 24%–67% resource reduction has been achieved from these ciphers. It makes the proposed cipher suitable for application in IoT security.