Survey and benchmark of lightweight block ciphers for MSP430 16-bit microcontroller

For security applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), choosing best algorithms in terms of energy-efficiency and of small memory requirements is a real challenge because the sensor networks are composed of low-power entities. In some previous works, 12 block-ciphers have been benchmarked on an ATMEL AVR ATtiny45 8-bit microcontroller and the best candidates to use in the context of small embedded platforms have been deduced. This article proposes to study on the TI 16-bit microcontroller MSP430 most of the recent lightweight block cipher proposals as well as some conventional block ciphers. First, we describe the design of the chosen block ciphers with a security and an implementation summary and we then present some implementation tests performed on our dedicated platform. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.