A Lightweight AEAD encryption core to secure IoT applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) with the advancements of many technologies opens a wide range of new applications such as smart appliances, smart cities and smart grids. Despite its popularity and usability, it also creates a new attack surface for the hackers especially on highly constrained devices which have limited memory footprints and processing power. These constrained devices often use Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) to secure data stored in the devices and transmitted over the network. In this work, we design a lightweight data encryption core in hardware with the support for AEAD to secure IoT applications on highly constrained devices. The design achieves a low area cost with only 23kGEs in TSMC 65nm technology and an encryption throughput of 123Mbps at 60MHz.