Abstract

8-bit microcontrollers can be used in a wide range of applications, such as the smart cards, telemedicine, cars and automation systems. In these application areas, security is one of the most important issues. The block ciphers, which can provide high-performance and reasonable security level, are meant to meet the security requirements of the 8-bit microcontrollers. In this paper, we realized the performance evaluation of the popular block cipher algorithms such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) (Daemen and Rijmen, 2002), Serpent (Anderson et al., 1998), Camellia (Aoki et al., 2001), CAST5 (Carlisle, 1997), and MARS (Burwick et al., 1998) on 8-bit Atmel microcontroller. The performance of the chosen block ciphers were evaluated in terms of the code/data memory requirement, execution time, and throughput criteria. According to the results obtained from target device, AES has better performance than other block ciphers in respect to throughput and code memory requirement. CAST5 and Camellia can be considered as a good alternative to AES. Serpent has a very bad performance in terms of throughput and Mars has a very bad performance in terms of memory requirement. 

Key words: Block cipher, low-cost, 8-bit microcontroller, algorithm, implementation.