Benchmarking of lightweight cryptographic algorithms for wireless IoT networks

International audienceCryptographic algorithms that can provide both encryption and authentication are increasingly required in modern security architectures and protocols (e.g. TLS v1.3). Many authenticated encryption systems have been proposed in the past few years, which has resulted in several cryptanalysis research work. In this same direction, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is coordinating a large effort to find a new standard authenticated encryption algorithm to be used by resource-constrained and limited devices. In this paper, 12 algorithms of the 33 candidates of the Round 2 phase from NIST competition are being benchmarked on a real IoT test-bed. These 33 ciphers implement authenticated encryption with associated data which aims at preserving integrity, privacy and authenticity at the same time. In this work, we ported the 12 algorithms to different hardware platforms (an x86_64 PC, an AVR ATmega128, an MSP430F1611 and the IoT-LAB platform) and make a fair comparison between their performance. We adapted these algorithms to the Contiki operating system to evaluate the latency and efficiency of each algorithm on IoT applications deployed on a national experimental platform which is IoT-LAB. In addition, we used the FELICS-AE benchmark to quantify locally the RAM, execution time and code size of each algorithm. In fact, this work provides practical results of their performance in an IoT scenario which pave the way for further research on other algorithms, platforms or OS