A flexible encryption technique for the internet of things environment

Abstract

IoT promises a new era of connectivity that goes beyond laptops and smart connected devices to connected vehicles, smart homes, smart cities and connected healthcare. The huge volume of data that is collected from millions of IoT devices raises information security and privacy concerns for users. This paper presents a new scalable encryption technique, called Flexible encryption Technique (FlexenTech), to protect IoT data during storage and in transit. FlexenTech is suitable for resource constrained devices and networks. It offers a low encryption time, defends against common attacks such as replay attacks and defines a configurable mode, where any number of rounds or key sizes may be used. Experimental analysis of FlexenTech shows its robustness in terms of its multiple configurable confidentiality levels by allowing various configurations. This configurability provides several advantages for resource constrained devices, including reducing the encryption computation time by up to 9.7% when compared to its best rivals in the literature.