High-Performance Hardware Implementation of LED block cipher

The Internet of Things has revolutionized daily life, but its widespread adoption raises significant security concerns due to the sensitive data involved. To address this, we propose utilizing the lightweight LED block cipher for IoT security. In this work, we proposed the use of the LED block cipher for encrypting and decrypting data on resource-constrained IoT devices. The hardware architecture of the LED algorithm was optimized to fit the limited resources of these applications. The initial 8 -bit sequential architecture contained 210 Slices and achieved a throughput of 5.71 Mbps. To improve the performance, we introduced an 8 -bit architecture for the MixColumns sub-function, resulting in a throughput of 10.26 Mbps with 222 Slices. Additionally, we presented a 16-bit sequential architecture with 243 Slices and a throughput of 8.36 Mbps. By further optimizing the MixColumns sub-function to 8 bits, we attained a throughput of 12.58 Mbps with 240 Slices. This optimization positively impacted the area implementation and power consumption of IoT applications, making our LED hardware architecture suitable for lightweight applications that prioritize high secrecy requirements.