Research Projects

IoT based consumer electronics are increasingly gaining importance, coupled with a thirst for computation anywhere and anytime. These electronic devices handle sensitive data and communicate amongst themselves and the end users. This calls for securing the data from intelligent adversaries. IoT applications are resource-constrained reasons being limited area, power, and lower computational capabilities, which makes it difficult to tradeoff security and performance when being part of the network. Banking, healthcare and defence applications, call for embedding the security paradigms. As a result, the designers focus shifts on security coupled with design optimizations for performance enhancement in IoT devices. Lightweight ciphers fit the requirement as opposed to traditional encryption algorithms. Lightweight symmetric ciphers provide good security simultaneously offering design optimizations warranting attention for IoT applications. The proposal aims to focus its attention on the architectural design of lightweight symmetric ciphers to achieve improvement in the design and performance metrics for secure IoT applications. Special attention will be paid to designing the substitution layer that forms the core of cryptographic algorithms so that it offers high throughput. The proposal will focus on implementing lightweight algorithms on both FPGA and ASIC and carry out its associated tradeoffs.