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With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, IoT devices are integrated into many of our daily lives, including industrial, security, medical, and personal applications. Many violations of IoT safety have appeared due to the critical physical infrastructure, and network vulnerabilities. Considering the nature of the restricted and limited resources of these devices in terms of size, capacity, and energy, Security is becoming increasingly important. Lightweight cryptography is one of the directions that offer security solutions in resource-constrained environments such as Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensor network (WSN).This paper discusses the security issues of these resource-constrained IoT devices and reviews the most prominent Lightweight Bock Cipher suitable for software implementation. Through studying thespecifications and the inner structure for each cipher and their implementation of the performance evaluation on some kind of platform, we provide a design strategies guideline for cryptographic developers to design improved Lightweight Block cipher solutions and compact software implementation for resource-constrained environments.

The efforts in designing and developing lightweight cryptography (LWC) started a decade ago. Many scholarly studies in literature report the enhancement of conventional cryptographic algorithms and the development of new algorithms. This significant number of studies resulted in the rise of many review studies on LWC in IoT. Due to the vast number of review studies on LWC in IoT, it is not known what the studies cover and how extensive the review studies are. Therefore, this article aimed to bridge the gap in the review studies by conducting a systematic scoping study. It analyzed the existing review articles on LWC in IoT to discover the extensiveness of the reviews and the topics covered. The results of the study suggested that many review studies are classified as overview-types of review focusing on generic LWC. Further, the topics of the reviews mainly focused on symmetric block cryptography, while limited reviews were found on asymmetric-key and hash in LWC. The outcomes of this study revealed that the reviews in LWC in IoT are still in their premature stage and researchers are encouraged to explore by conducting review studies in the less-attended areas. An extensive review of studies that cover these two topics is deemed necessary to establish a balance of scholarly works in LWC for IoT and encourage more empirical research in the area.