MPRESENT: A Lightweight Cryptographic Cipher for Optimizing Energy Efficiency in IoT Applications

Abstract

The growing demand for energy-efficient cryptographic solutions to the Internet of Things (IoT) applications has prompted the need for lightweight ciphers that balance security parameters, performance, and resource usage. Existing lightweight ciphers require many clock cycles, some in the S-boxes and others in the P-layer, which limits their efficiency in resource-constrained environments. Despite the strong security metrics of some of these lightweight algorithms, they do not meet the stringent energy and processing demands of IoT devices. To address this problem, we propose a modified version of the PRESENT cipher, named MPRESENT, which optimizes energy efficiency without compromising security. The main objective of this study is to reduce the number of clock cycles required for encryption and decryption while maintaining the same code size and ensuring adequate security performance. MPRESENT cipher is implemented and evaluated on the AVR 8-bit Atmel 128 microcontroller using the Fair Evaluation of Lightweight Cryptographic Systems (FELICS) framework. Comparative analysis with other Substitution–Permutation Network (SPN) ciphers shows that MPRESENT outperforms existing ciphers in terms of clock cycle efficiency where it reduces the number of clock cycles required for encryption from 3 × 10^7 to 1.5 × 10^6 for a 128-bit input. Additionally, the security strength of MPRESENT is evaluated through its avalanche effect, with results of 49% and 50.5% on diffusion and confusion, respectively. Notably, the code size of MPRESENT remains unchanged at 2754 bytes, which is identical to that of the original PRESENT cipher.