AbstractLightweight ciphers are increasingly employed in cryptography because of the high demand for secure data transmission in wireless sensor network, embedded devices, and Internet of Things. The PRESENT algorithm as an ultra‐lightweight block cipher provides better solution for secure hardware cryptography with low power consumption and minimum resource. This study generates the key using key rotation and substitution method, which contains key rotation, key switching, and binary‐coded decimal‐based key generation used in image encryption. The key rotation and substitution‐based PRESENT architecture is proposed to increase security level for data stream and randomness in cipher through providing high resistance to attacks. Lookup table is used to design the key scheduling module, thus reducing the area of architecture. Field‐programmable gate array (FPGA) performances are evaluated for the proposed and conventional methods. In Virtex 6 device, the proposed key rotation and substitution PRESENT architecture occupied 72 lookup tables, 65 flip flops, and 35 slices which are comparably less to the existing architecture.