On the Design Strategies of Diffusion Layers and Key Schedule in Lightweight Block Ciphers

Abstract

In recent years, lightweight cryptography has become essential especially for the resource-constrained devices to ensure data protection and security. The selection of suitable cryptographic algorithm which is directly linked to requirements of the system will have dynamically effect on following such metrics like performance of the device, hardware resource cost, the area, speed, efficiency, computation latency, communication bandwidth. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the lightweight block ciphers that were given in the literature and throw a light on the future research directions. Then, the focus is given to the diffusion layers in view of construction methods and efficiency. A new metric based on the order of the matrix to measure the security of diffusion layer consisting MDS matrix over a finite field extension is proposed and related experimental results are given. Key schedule of the lightweight block ciphers is analyzed.