An evaluation of AES and present ciphers for lightweight cryptography on smartphones

In this work we present a study that evaluates and compares two block ciphers, AES and PRESENT, in the context of lightweight cryptography for smartphones security applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comparison between these ciphers using a smartphone as computing platform. AES is the standard for symmetric encryption and PRESENT is one of the first ultra-lightweight ciphers proposed in the literature and included in the ISO/IEC 29192-2. In our study, we consider execution time, voltage consumption and memory usage as metrics for comparison purposes. The two block ciphers were evaluated through several experiments in a low-cost smartphone using Android built in tools. From the results we conclude that, for general purpose encryption AES performs statistically better although block-to-block PRESENT delivers better results.