Fault-Resilient Lightweight Cryptographic Block Ciphers for Secure Embedded Systems

The development of extremely-constrained embedded systems having sensitive nodes such as RFID tags and nanosensors necessitates the use of lightweight block ciphers. Nevertheless, providing the required security properties does not guarantee their reliability and hardware assurance when the architectures are prone to natural and malicious faults. In this letter, error detection schemes for lightweight block ciphers are proposed with the case study of XTEA (eXtended TEA). Lightweight block ciphers such as XTEA, PRESENT, SIMON, and the like might be better suited for low-resource deeply-embedded systems compared to the Advanced Encryption Standard. Three different error detection approaches are presented and according to our fault-injection simulations, high error coverage is achieved. Finally, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations of these proposed error detection structures are presented to assess their efficiency and overhead. The schemes presented can also be applied to lightweight hash functions with similar structures, making the presented schemes suitable for providing reliability to their lightweight security-constrained hardware implementations.