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 modern lifestyle. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is helping to provide the solutions by inter-connecting the smart devices. Lightweight block ciphers are deployed to enable the 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 32-bit input with 8 branches and branch number 7 to optimize the security. The strength of RAZOR is proved 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 mega bytes per second to encrypt the large files makes it a better choice for software oriented IoT applications.