Implementation of PRINCE with resource-efficient structures based on FPGAs

Abstract

In this era of pervasive computing, low-resource devices have been deployed in various fields. PRINCE is a lightweight block cipher designed for low latency, and is suitable for pervasive computing applications. In this paper, we propose new circuit structures for PRINCE components by sharing and simplifying logic circuits, to achieve the goal of using a smaller number of logic gates to obtain the same result. Based on the new circuit structures of components and the best sharing among components, we propose three new hardware architectures for PRINCE. The architectures are simulated and synthesized on different programmable gate array devices. The results on Virtex-6 show that compared with existing architectures, the resource consumption of the unrolled, low-cost, and two-cycle architectures is reduced by 73, 119, and 380 slices, respectively. The low-cost architecture costs only 137 slices. The unrolled architecture costs 409 slices and has a throughput of 5.34 Gb/s. To our knowledge, for the hardware implementation of PRINCE, the new low-cost architecture sets new area records, and the new unrolled architecture sets new throughput records. Therefore, the newly proposed architectures are more resource-efficient and suitable for lightweight, latency-critical applications.

Keywords

Lightweight block cipher / Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) / Low-cost / PRINCE / Embedded security

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2021 Zhejiang University Press