Performance Analysis of Contemporary Light-Weight Block Ciphers on 8-bit Microcontrollers

This work presents a performance analysis of software implementations of ciphers that are specially designed for the domain of ubiquitous computing. The analysis focuses on the special properties of embedded devices that need to be taken into account like cost (given by memory consumption) and energy requirements. The discussed ciphers include DESL, HIGHT, SEA, and TEA/XTEA. Assembler implementations of the ciphers for an 8-bit AVR microcontroller platform were analyzed and compared with a byte-oriented AES implementation. While all ciphers fail to outperform AES on the discussed 8-bit platform, TEA/XTEA and SEA at least consume significantly less memory than the AES.