Lightweight cryptography on programmable system on chip: Standalone software implementation

Embedded systems of today are being designed to be highly reliable, to respond to real-time system demands, to have functional flexibility and most importantly to run on low power sources. These ubiquitous systems are nowadays being employed to handle highly sensitive data including global positioning, health, banking and personal data. Based on these trends, the demands on their security mechanism have increased, not only because of newly emerging threats that embedded systems face but also due to the power resource constraints that compels the revisiting of the security approach. Lightweight cryptosystems becomes a feasible option and in this work we implement two lightweight algorithms namely PRESENT and Clefia, together with their counterpart well-known symmetric encryption algorithms AES and 3DES, on a dual core ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) platform. We observe the dynamics of implementing the algorithms on such a device and study its performance. The implementation was carried out by means of standalone bare metal software implementation that executes directly on the dual core ARM CPU. The result is presented and compared to normal PC-based Linux implementation.