REVIEW AND COMPARISON OF AES LIGHTWEIGHT MODIFICATIONS FOR A LOW-POWER DEVICES NETWORK

Nowadays, the development of smart city concepts and cyber-physical systems is impossible
without considering information security issues. In the conditions of limited computational
resources, it is necessary to find a trade-off between the cryptographic strength of the encryption
algorithm and its requirements. As part of the study, lightweight modifications of the AES symmetric
block cipher are compared to identify the most balanced solution for ensuring the confidentiality of
low-power devices communication. The comparison is made both in terms of theoretical indicators
that determine cryptographic strength, and in terms of encryption and decryption time, depending
on the size of the input data. The obtained results demonstrate that the Modified AES is the most
balanced solution in relation to the specified requirements. It outperforms not only other modifications,
but also the standard algorithm, improving the diffusion and confusion values by 5% and 30%
respectively, and also reducing the average encryption/decryption time by one and a half times