FELICS - Fair Evaluation of Lightweight Cryptographic Systems

In this paper we introduce FELICS, a free and open-source benchmarking framework designed for fair and consistent evaluation of software implementations of lightweight cryptographic primitives for embedded devices. The framework is very flexible thanks to its modular structure, which allows for an easy integration of new metrics, target devices and evaluation scenarios. It consists of two modules that can currently asses the performance of lightweight block and stream ciphers on three widely used microcontrollers: 8-bit AVR, 16-bit MSP and 32-bit ARM. The metrics extracted are execution time, RAM consumption and binary code size. FELICS has a simple user interface and is intended to be used by cipher designers to compare new primitives with the state of the art. The extracted metrics are very detailed and assist embedded software engineers in selecting the best cipher to match the requirements of a particular application. The tool aims to increase the transparency and trust in benchmarking results of lightweight primitives and facilitates a fair comparison between different primitives using the same evaluation conditions.