A Comparative Analysis of Lightweight Hash Functions Using AVR ATXMega128 and ChipWhisperer

2025-08-11

AI Summary

Lightweight hash functions are critical for resource-constrained embedded and IoT systems, yet their real-world performance trade-offs—particularly between energy efficiency and computational throughput—remain poorly characterized. Method: This paper presents a systematic empirical evaluation of 22 state-of-the-art lightweight hash functions on an AVR ATxMega128 microcontroller using the ChipWhisperer platform. We propose a reproducible benchmarking methodology and introduce E-RANK, a novel composite metric integrating cycles-per-byte (CpB), RAM/ROM footprint, and dynamic energy consumption to quantify the energy–performance trade-off. Contribution/Results: Experimental results reveal substantial performance divergence across algorithms under realistic hardware constraints, identify optimal candidates per use case (e.g., ultra-low-power vs. throughput-critical scenarios), and highlight the decisive impact of memory access patterns and instruction-level parallelism on efficiency. The study delivers actionable, reproducible guidance for algorithm selection and energy-aware implementation, advancing practical deployment of lightweight cryptography in constrained environments.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Lightweight hash functions have become important building blocks for security in embedded and IoT systems. A plethora of algorithms have been proposed and standardized, providing a wide range of performance trade-off options for developers to choose from. This paper presents a comparative analysis of 22 key software-based lightweight hash functions, including the finalist from the SHA-3 competition. We use a novel benchmark methodology that combines an AVR ATXMega128 microcontroller with the ChipWhisperer cryptanalysis platform and evaluate and compare the various hash functions along several dimensions, including execution speed, % measured in Cycles per Byte (CpB), memory footprint, and energy consumption. Using the composite E-RANK metric, we provide new insight into the various trade-offs each hash function offers to system developers.

Problem

• Compare performance of 22 lightweight hash functions
• Evaluate speed, memory, and energy consumption trade-offs
• Use AVR and ChipWhisperer for novel benchmarking

Innovation

• AVR ATXMega128 microcontroller for benchmarking
• ChipWhisperer cryptanalysis platform integration
• Composite E-RANK metric for trade-off analysis