Multiradix Trivium Implementations for Low-Power IoT Hardware

Abstract

The integration of lightweight symmetric encryption is becoming increasingly widespread in very low-power Internet of Things applications, with the rapid emergence of very low energy block and stream ciphers in portable and wireless systems. Trivium is one of the lightweight stream ciphers shortlisted for the hardware profile of the eSTREAM project. This paper describes low-power multiradix Trivium implementations based on the use of parallelization techniques to reduce dynamic power consumption. The low-power Trivium designs were implemented and characterized in TSMC 90 nm to compare area resources and power reduction. The implementation results show that our proposed designs offer dynamic power savings of 31%–45% with radix-1 and radix-2 when compared with the standard Trivium, and 15% with radix-8. There is no improvement, however, with radix-16.