FPGA-based high-throughput and area-efficient architectures of the Hummingbird cryptography

Hummingbird is an ultra-lightweight cryptography targeted for resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags, smart cards and sensor nodes. It has been implemented across different target platforms. In this paper, we present two different FPGA-based implementations for both throughput-oriented (TO) and area-oriented (AO) Hummingbird Cryptography (HC). The throughput-oriented design is optimized for operation speed while the area-oriented design consumes smaller area resource usage. Both proposed designs have been implemented on a Xilinx low-cost Spartan-3 XC3S200 FPGA. When compared with existed methods, the results from the proposed designs show that our designs cost less FPGA slices while the same throughput can be obtained. The proposed architectures are designed to best suit for adding customizable security to embedded control systems.