Ultra-lightweight symmetric-key cipher for resource constrained systems

In this paper, we present a new ultra lightweight reconfigurable security primitive that consumes orders of magnitude less energy than current state of the art ciphers. The essential idea is to use a matrix of randomly connected lookup tables (LUTs) to form the input-output mapping, whose configuration serves as the shared secret key. We apply our lookup table-based cipher (LUTC) to the NIST randomness benchmark suite and demonstrate that it passes all tests. Finally, we compare the energy and area overhead to existing symmetric key ciphers including AES, HIGHT, and PRESENT, and show orders of magnitude reduction in energy.