sesa 15(3): e4

Research Article

WG-8: A Lightweight Stream Cipher for Resource-Constrained Smart Devices

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  • @ARTICLE{10.4108/sesa.2.3.e4,
    author={Xinxin Fan and Kalikinkar Mandal and Guang Gong},
    title={WG-8: A Lightweight Stream Cipher for Resource-Constrained Smart Devices},
    journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Security and Safety},
    volume={2},
    number={3},
    publisher={ICST},
    journal_a={SESA},
    year={2015},
    month={1},
    keywords={Lightweight stream cipher, resource-constrained smart device, cryptanalysis, efficient implementation.},
    doi={10.4108/sesa.2.3.e4}
}
  • Xinxin Fan
    Kalikinkar Mandal
    Guang Gong
    Year: 2015
    WG-8: A Lightweight Stream Cipher for Resource-Constrained Smart Devices
    SESA
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/sesa.2.3.e4
Xinxin Fan1,*, Kalikinkar Mandal1, Guang Gong1
  • 1: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, CANADA
*Contact email: x5fan@uwaterloo.ca

Abstract

Lightweight cryptographic primitives are essential for securing pervasive embedded devices like RFID tags, smart cards, and wireless sensor nodes. In this paper, we present a lightweight stream cipher WG-8, which is tailored from the well-known Welch-Gong (WG) stream cipher family, for resource-constrained devices. WG-8 inherits the good randomness and cryptographic properties of the WG stream cipher family and is resistant to the most common attacks against stream ciphers. The software implementations of the WG-8 stream cipher on two popular low-power microcontrollers as well as the extensive comparison with other lightweight cryptography implementations highlight that in the context of securing lightweight embedded applications WG-8 has favorable performance and low energy consumption.

Keywords
Lightweight stream cipher, resource-constrained smart device, cryptanalysis, efficient implementation.
Received
2014-03-29
Accepted
2014-12-23
Published
2015-01-30
Publisher
ICST
http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/sesa.2.3.e4

Copyright © 2014 Xinxin Fan et al., licensed to ICST. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited.