ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a new view on the development of cryptography to address the security needs of networked resource constrained devices, relevant developments in the area of cryptography, and future avenues of promising research. It describes the development of the novel paradigm of lightweight cryptography for resource limited environments. Research outcomes from light-weight cryptography can be utilized to provide security services such as authentication, confidentiality and anonymity for resource limited microelectronic tags. Fundamental thinking and design paradigms envisioned to create cryptographic solutions are guided by the limitations and computation boundaries of the underlying technology. Lightweight cryptography needs to encompass three separate but related areas of light-weight: hardware, cryptographic protocols, and primitives to provide a complete solution. Lightweight hardware focuses on research to develop efficient low cost hardware implementations of cryptographic primitives and protocols. The process of developing or optimizing existing hardware for security mechanisms has been an active area of research for smart card processors.
