Design and Implementation of novel datapath designs of lightweight cipher RECTANGLE for resource constrained environment

The advancements in IoT and manufacturing techniques has given rise to the use of small embedded devices such as RFIDs, sensor nodes and smart cards. Due to hardware and software constraints, the standard encryption algorithm like AES cannot be used for encryption of such devices. Thus lightweight block ciphers like PRESENT, LED, MIDORI, and RECTANGLE were proposed. RECTANGLE cipher uses Bit-slice technology to make it suitable for the extremely constrained environment. For achieving high efficiency and good performance, along with the selection of the cipher, it is important to implement it with the right datapath. In this paper, we have focused on the hardware implementation of block cipher RECTANGLE with different novel datapaths. In this paper, we have proposed, implemented and evaluated 5 most efficient datapaths of different data bus size of RECTANGLE cipher. All these datapaths are implemented on different FPGA platforms with the same implementation conditions and the results are compared on every performance metric. Based on the device and desired performance metrics, one can choose the best-suited architecture for their application. This paper presents a novel architectures of cipher RECTANGLE suitable for the constrained environment. We have also compared the metrics of the proposed architectures with that of other standard lightweight block ciphers to obtain a better insight on the resourcefulness of the proposed datapaths.