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Abstract. Wireless sensor networks and Radio Frequency Identifiers are becoming mainstream applications of ubiquitous computing. They are slowly being integrated into our infrastructure and therefore must incorporate a certain level of security. However, both applications are severely resource constrained. Energy scavenger powered sensor nodes and current RFID tags provide only 20 µW to 50 µW of power to the digital component of their circuits. This makes complex cryptography a luxury. In this paper we present a novel ultra-low power SHA-1 design and an energy efficient ultra-low power AES design. Both consume less than 30 µW of power and can therefore be used to provide the basic security services of encryption and authentication. Furthermore, we analyze their energy consumption based on the TinySec protocol and come to the somewhat surprising result, that SHA-1 based authentication and encryption is more energy efficient than using AES for payload sizes of 17 bytes or larger.

Abstract. The tiny encryption algorithm (TEA) was developed by Wheeler and Needham as a simple computer program for encryption. This paper is the first design-space exploration for hardware implementations of the extended tiny encryption algorithm. It presents efficient implementations of XTEA on FPGAs and ASICs for ultra-low power applications such as RFID tags and wireless sensor nodes as well as fully pipelined designs for high speed applications. A novel ultra-low power implementation is introduced which consumes less area and energy than a comparable AES implementation. Furthermore, XTEA is compared with stream ciphers from the eSTREAM portfolio and lightweight ciphers. The high speed implementations of XTEA operate at 20.6 Gbps (FPGA) or 36.6 Gbps (ASIC).

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