Abstract
Information security, being one of the corner stones of network and communication technology, has been evolving tremendously to cope with the parallel evolution of network security threats. Hence, cipher algorithms in the core of the information security process have more crucial role to play here, with continuous need for new and unorthodox designs to meet the increasing complexity of the applications environment that keep offering challenges to the current existing cipher algorithms. The aim of this review is to present symmetric cipher main components, the modern and lightweight symmetric cipher algorithms design based on the components that utilized in cipher design, highlighting the effect of each component and the essential component among them, how the modern cipher has modified to lightweight cipher by reducing the number and size of these components, clarify how these components give the strength for symmetric cipher versus asymmetric of cipher. Moreover, a new classification of cryptography algorithms to four categories based on four factors is presented. Finally, some modern and lightweight symmetric cipher algorithms are selected, presented with a comparison between them according to their components by taking into considerations the components impact on security, performance, and resource requirements.