Low Cost Implementation of Authenticated Encryption Using Spongift

The security of information being transmitted through wireless communication is of vital importance. Authenticated encryption aims to provide security through the confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of data transmitted. Wireless sensor nodes have their own operational constraints, which makes the security algorithm light in terms of area and low power consumption. In this work, a novel architecture of authenticated encryption is proposed that combines the lightweight symmetric block cipher GIFT for encryption and the SPONGE function for authentication. Iterative architectures of GIFT-64 and GIFT-128 are proposed and implemented with minimum resources and better throughput on various FPGA devices. Moreover, two hash functions, namely Spongift-56 and Spongift-112, are also proposed and implemented with minimum resources. A perfect combination of the proposed iterative GIFT architecture and the Spongift function is a better choice for authenticated encryption to be deployed in resource-constrained environments like wireless sensor nodes.