Hardware design and implementation of a lightweight stream-cipher cryptosystem: A Chaotic/Reversible Cellular Automata Approach

In this paper, the hardware implementation of a Chaotic/RCA-based cryptosystem devoted to information security purposes on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is given. The Xilinx System Generator software tools (XSG) are adopted to design a complex high-performance Chen-based PRNG to generate Pseudo-random key streams and a chaotic/Reversible Cellular Automata-based cryptosystem following the stream-cipher mode. Then, the hardware design of the overall cryptosystem is implemented on an FPGA Zedboard achieving a high throughput of 23987.2 Mbps and working at a superb frequency of 187.4 MHz. The NIST 800–22 SP test suite and some other security tests are employed to validate the efficiency of the given cryptosystem. Additionally, the obtained results are compared to recent works given in the literature. These results highlight the efficiency of the cryptosystem in terms of security, rapidity, lightweight, robustness, and low resource utilization.