Preliminary evaluation of a minimal number of rounds in lightweight block ciphers for providing their satisfactory statistical properties

We experimentally evaluate a minimal number of rounds, which provide satisfactory statistical properties of some well-known and new lightweight block ciphers. The experiments employed the “Book Stack” test. The testing scheme was as follows. We increased the number of rounds until the test detected deviations from randomness. Depending on the cipher, the blocks were represented by two, three or four $32$-bit words. The testing sample consisted of the first words in blocks. The size of the sample was $2^{26}$ bytes.