LELBC: A low energy lightweight block cipher for smart agriculture

The massive collection and transmission of various crop and livestock data in smart agriculture leads to serious security concerns. Furthermore, many Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart agriculture are battery-powered, with limited energy resources. Therefore, a low energy lightweight block cipher (LELBC) is proposed to overcome the data leakage problem during sensor data transmission in smart agriculture. Firstly, a new permutation substitution permutation (PSP) structure is proposed, taking into account the energy resource constraints of unified encryption and decryption (ED) circuits. It has highly consistent encryption and decryption and a good diffusion effect. Secondly, a 4-bit low energy involutive S-box is obtained based on a genetic algorithm. The proposed S-box has lower area and latency compared to the existing S-boxes. The experimental data show that LELBC consumes 1864 gate equivalents (GE) in area and 6.99 μ J/bit in energy (encryption + decryption) under the UMC 0.18μm 1P6M process library. LELBC decreases energy and area consumption by 24.02% and 24.04%, respectively, compared to Midori. Finally, a temperature collection and encryption transmission platform is established. LELBC is deployed on the platform to encrypt the collected data, establishing the first line of defense for the secure transmission of smart agriculture sensor data.