Ultra Low Power SIMON Core for Lightweight Encryption
Tutu Wan, Emre Salman · 2018
Security is a significant challenge for a variety of emerging applications within pervasive computing such as the deployment of IoT devices at a massive scale. SIMON, a lightweight cryptographic algorithm, is a promising candidate for encryption in a resource-constrained environment. An ultra low power hardware implementation of a SIMON block cipher is developed in this paper. The theory of adiabatic switching is leveraged in a bit-serialized SIMON core with 32-bit plaintext and 64-bit key. The proposed hardware-level innovations enable 27.5X higher energy efficiency (kilobit per second per Watt) at the expense of 18% less throughput as compared to conventional implementations.