Securing IoT devices with fast and energy efficient implementation of PRIDE and PRESENT ciphers

Abstract

The rise of low-power, cost-efficient internet-connected devices has led to a need for lightweight cryptography. The lightweight block cipher PRIDE, designed by Martin R. Albrecht, is one of the most efficient ciphers designed for IoT-constrained environments. It is useful for connected devices, requires fewer resources to implement, and has high performance. PRIDE is a software-oriented lightweight cipher optimized for microcontrollers. This paper focuses on the FPGA implementation of the PRIDE cipher by keeping throughput, energy, and power consumption metrics focused. The paper also presents a novel and simpler diagrammatical view of a Matrix Layer implementation of the PRIDE cipher. We also implemented the PRESENT cipher using the same metrics. We analyzed different design metrics on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and compared the metrics of the PRIDE implementation with the well-known cipher PRESENT. This gives us an insight into the efficiency and reliability of PRIDE in IoT-constrained environments. We also proposed different architectures of the PRIDE cipher for 16-bit and 32-bit datapaths.