Dietary Recommendations for Lightweight Block Ciphers: Power, Energy and Area Analysis of Recently Developed Architectures

In this paper we perform a comprehensive area, power, and energy analysis of some of the most recently-developed lightweight block ciphers and we compare them to the standard AES algorithm. We do this for several different architectures of the considered block ciphers. Our evaluation method consists of estimating the pre-layout power consumption and the derived energy using Cadence Encounter RTL Compiler and ModelSIM simulations. We show that the area is not always correlated to the power and energy consumption, which is of importance for mobile battery-fed devices. As a result, this paper can be used to make a choice of architecture when the algorithm has already been fixed; or it can help deciding which algorithm to choose based on energy and key/block length requirements.