A novel key generation algorithm from twitter data stream for secure communication in IoT

Abstract

Secure wireless communication based applications in IoT typically require very short sessions. Stream ciphers constitute a popular choice for ensuring security of data communications in such applications. To keep the cost, complexity and energy expenditure in the implementation of such stream cipher algorithms low, the short duration of the wireless communication sessions are often exploited by using a lightweight cryptographic (LWC) algorithm. Such an LWC algorithm will provide the desired security during the short session at the required speed, and a new key will be used for the next session so that an adversary would not have enough time to decipher the key of any session. In this paper, we propose a technique based on generating stream of random keys from streaming twitter data. The sequence of random keys generated by the proposed tweet-based key generation (TBKG) algorithm has been tested by the NIST statistical test suite for randomness. The test results show that TBKG algorithm passes all the fifteen tests for randomness. Also, the period of the key values is quite high, thus making it suitable for use over short sessions involving communication of 350 MB data through the wireless network. The unpredictability of the generated random key values is governed by the unpredictable nature of the tweets from thousands of individuals. The algorithm is very simple to implement with low computational and energy overhead.