  Security in embedded systems has become a main requirement in modern
electronic devices. The demand for low-cost and highly secure cryptographic
algorithms is increasingly growing in fields such as mobile telecommunications,
handheld devices, etc. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the development
of cheap and relatively fast hardware implementations of the KATAN family of
block ciphers. KATAN is a family of six hardware oriented block ciphers. All
KATAN ciphers share an 80-bit key and have 32, 48, or 64-bit blocks. We use
VHDL under Altera Quartus in conjunction with ModelSim to implement and analyze
our hardware designs. The developed designs are mapped onto high-performance
Field Programmable Gate Arrays. We compare our findings with similar hardware
implementations and C software versions of the algorithms. The performance
analysis of the C implementations is done using Intel Vtune Amplifier running
on Dell precision T7500 with its dual quad-core Xeon processor and 24 GB of
RAM. The obtained results show better performance when compared with existing
hardware and software implementations.
