RAZOR: A Lightweight Block Cipher for Security in IoT.

Abstract

Rapid technological developments prompted a need to do everything from anywhere and that is growing due to the modern lifestyle. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is helping to provide solutions by interconnecting smart devices. Lightweight block ciphers are deployed to enable security in such devices. In this paper, a new lightweight block cipher RAZOR is proposed that is based on a hybrid design technique. The round function of RAZOR is designed by mixing the Feistel and substitution permutation network techniques. The rotation and XOR-based diffusion function is applied on the 32-bit input with 8 branches to optimize the security. The strength of RAZOR is proven against differential, linear, and impossible differential attacks. The number of active S-boxes in any 5-round differential characteristic of RAZOR is 21 in comparison to the 10, 6, 4, 7, and 6 for PRESENT, Rectangle, LBlock, GIFT, and SCENERY respectively. RAZOR provides better security than the existing lightweight designs. The average throughput of 1.47 MB/second to encrypt large files makes it a better choice for software-oriented IoT applications.

Description