Lightweight Cryptography For Resource-Constrained Iot Devices: A Comparative Analysis Of Block Ciphers In Smart Grids
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29284/2245f174Keywords:
lightweight cryptography, IoT security, smart grid, block cipher, PRESENT, GIFT, SIMON, SPECK, energy-efficient encryption.Abstract
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices within smart grid infrastructure has introduced substantial cybersecurity challenges, particularly where endpoints possess severely limited computational resources. Standard cryptographic protocols such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) impose prohibitive overhead on memory-limited microcontrollers, motivating the development of purpose-designed lightweight block ciphers. This study presents a systematic comparative analysis of seven prominent lightweight block ciphers—PRESENT, SIMON, SPECK, GIFT, TWINE, LED, and MIDORI—evaluated against AES-128 as a conventional baseline. Evaluation dimensions encompass hardware gate equivalent (GE) area, software throughput, energy consumption per encrypted block, random-access memory (RAM) footprint, and code-size requirements, assessed across representative smart grid deployment contexts including smart meters, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) sensors, remote terminal units (RTUs), and edge gateways. Experimental results reveal that GIFT achieves the lowest hardware area at 1,480 GE with an energy cost of 0.19 μJ per block, while SPECK delivers the highest software throughput at 58.3 Mbps on resource-limited microcontrollers. A tiered deployment framework is proposed, matching cipher selection to device capability class within smart grid layered architectures. This work offers actionable guidance for security engineers designing cryptographic protocols for resource-constrained smart infrastructure.
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