Secure End-to-End Communications with Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithm

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a lightweight cryptographic implementation of KATAN32 on ESP32 microcontroller, enabling secure, efficient end-to-end communication suitable for resource-constrained environments.

Contribution

It presents an optimized implementation of KATAN32 on ESP32, benchmarking its performance and demonstrating secure, low-power communication in resource-limited settings.

Findings

Efficient encryption and decryption with low power consumption

Benchmarking shows favorable memory and throughput performance

Secure end-to-end data transmission achieved

Abstract

The field of lightweight cryptography has been gaining popularity as traditional cryptographic techniques are challenging to implement in resource-limited environments. This research paper presents an approach to utilizing the ESP32 microcontroller as a hardware platform to implement a lightweight cryptographic algorithm. Our approach employs KATAN32, the smallest block cipher of the KATAN family, with an 80-bit key and 32-bit blocks. The algorithm requires less computational power as it employs an 80 unsigned 64-bit integer key for encrypting and decrypting data. During encryption, a data array is passed into the encryption function with a key, which is then used to fill a buffer with an encrypted array. Similarly, the decryption function utilizes a buffer to fill an array of original data in 32 unsigned 64-bit integers. This study also investigates the optimal implementation of cryptography block ciphers, benchmarking performance against various metrics, including memory requirements (RAM), throughput, power consumption, and security. Our implementation demonstrates that data can be securely transmitted end-to-end with good throughput and low power consumption.