Citation :

Signameneni Krishnapriya, "FeatherCrypt: An Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher for Batteryless IoT Devices," International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT), vol. 74, no. 7, pp. 230-242, 2026. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/22315381/IJETT-V74I7P116

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices with no battery or energy-harvesting capabilities, like passive RFID tags, NFC modules, and intermittently-powered sensors, have extremely constrained requirements on both power and memory as well as on hardware area. Providing data confidentiality in these setups has been difficult because the traditional cryptographic primitives have energy and computational overheads that are prohibitive. In this paper, FeatherCrypt, a new ultra-lightweight block cipher, is presented that is specifically targeted at providing security in communication between battery-less IoT systems. FeatherCrypt uses a small Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) architecture that is designed to address low switching, low pillar, and deterministic implementation in intermittency power. The cipher will include a block size of 64bits and either key sizes of 64 bits or 80 bits, and use specifically designed 4-bit substitution boxes and lightweight nonlinearity-based permutation layers to reach significant diffusion and nonlinearity with a minimal hardware footprint. Hardware implementation with a 90-nm CMOS process shows that FeatherCrypt consists of only 1180 gate equivalents and only 0.87 microjoules/encryption, which runs a full encryption in 824 clock cycles at 200 kHz. Implementations on low-power microcontrollers evidenced a small memory footprint of 980 bytes of program code and 456 bytes of RAM, which can be deployed on ultra-constrained environments. Security analysis indicates a high level of resistance to different and linear cryptanalysis, a good avalanche property, and none of them exhibit fixed points. FeatherCrypt provides a trade-off between the energy consumption, hardware area, latency, and cryptographic strength that is optimized in comparison to the current lightweight block ciphers. These findings indicate that FeatherCrypt can be effectively used in the next-generation batteryless IoT applications with security, sustainability, and privacy.

Keywords

Lightweight Cryptography, Batteryless Internet of Things, Energy Harvesting Devices, Block Cipher Design, Hardware-Efficient Security.

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