A Comprehensive Survey on Light weight block Ciphers with Authentication approaches for low resource IoT devices

Abstract

Resource limited devices like IoT nodes, RFID tags, wireless sensor networks, and embedded edge technologies can now be safeguarded with the help of lightweight cryptography. Traditional cryptographic primitives are not suitable for these devices because they work under stringent conditions on power, area, storage, and latency. With emphasis on hardware implementations, this review offers an in depth and methodical analysis of existing lightweight block ciphers and authentication techniques. High-profile journal articles published between 2018 and 2026 are scrutinized and analyzed using a PRISMA-based methodology. The study includes techniques that are focused on authentication as well as traditional and new lightweight block ciphers. Metrics at the ASIC and FPGA levels, including LUTs, power usage, frequency, slices, latency, throughput, and hardware efficiency, are used to perform quantitative comparisons. Significant design trade-offs between area-optimized, throughput-oriented, and energy-efficient designs are highlighted in the analysis, along with the increasing trend of integrated encryption–authentication approaches. The survey also finds inadequacies in side-channel resilience, scalability across various heterogeneous platforms, security–efficiency co-optimization, and uniform benchmarking. Finally, future research scope is described for leading the creation of emerging lightweight cryptographic architectures that strike a undermine between hardware efficiency and robustness for contexts with limited resources.