Performance Evaluation of Lightweight Stream Ciphers for Real-Time Video Feed Encryption on ARM Processor

Abstract

In resource-intensive Internet of Things applications, Lightweight Stream Ciphers (LWSCs) play a vital role in influencing both the security and performance of the system. Numerous LWSCs have been proposed, each offering certain properties and trade-offs that carefully balance security and performance requirements. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of prominent LWSCs, with a focus on their performance and resource consumption, providing insights into efficiency, efficacy, and suitability in the real-world application of resource-intensive live video feed encryption on an ARM processor. The study involves the development of a benchmarking tool designed to evaluate key metrics, including encryption frame rate, throughput, processing cycles, memory footprint, ROM utilization, and energy consumption. In addition, we apply the E−Rank metric, which combines key performance and resource metrics to derive a unified comparative measure for overall software performance.

Keywords

• lightweight cryptography
• stream cipher
• performance evaluation
• Internet of Things
• resource-intensive application