A high-throughput, low area implementation of PRINCE algorithm for Industrial IoT

The promising era of pervasive computing, or IoT, poses extra challenges when it comes to security requirements and performance tradeoffs. The wave of Industry 4.0 requires extra security mechanisms comprising (among others) authentication, integrity protection, and encryption when it comes to a wireless communication in the factory. This presentation illustrates the requirements of such applications and presents an implementation of the non-standardized PRINCE block cipher. The algorithm is tailored for low-latency usage and suitable for high-throughput and area-constraint IoT applications. A pragmatic use-case for massive IoT (mIoT) industrial applications operating within the 5G framework forms the basis of the proposed architecture. The challenges to adapt the algorithm to the stringent ultra-low-latency and high-throughput requirements in 5G are highlighted. An FPGA implementation that addresses the envisioned 5G data rates is derived. In the approach presented here, the algorithms datapath is optimized via pipelining technique to achieve high-throughput rates without sacrificing latency. The implementation is then compared against the known and mostly used cipher AES. It will be shown that the advantage of the PRINCE algorithm is the low area cost which can be achieved by its lighter computation.