A Structured Lightweight Encryption Architecture for Data Protection in IoT

Abstract

Accelerated growth in networking and semiconductor devices led to the increase of Internet-connected devices over recent years. The applications of IoT provide pervasive admittance, scalability, and distribution of data using the cloud for the storage and processing of data. All the actors involved in the grid affect the trust. Managing security and deploying it throughout the IoT environment is required to audit and protect sensitive data. Security management involves authentication to avoid unauthorized entry and encryption at transmission. Though there are standard methodologies employed in data protection in the cloud and network layers, there is a requirement for solutions with low foot-prints suitable for constrained IoT devices. While there are existing lightweight cipher designs performing well with less memory footprint, the performance in the cloud is less compared to traditional cipher techniques. So, a balanced solution with less memory footprint and resistance against various attacks in the cloud environment is required. A lightweight cipher design is proposed to enable secure communication among devices through the cloud, which is combined with Elliptic Light (ELLI) and an Authentication Function (AF) is proposed using RC4 to ensure integrity and authentication and exchange secret key. The cipher design proposed provides increased efficiency and fixes the weakness in standard lightweight algorithms. This algorithm is simple and efficient, with 60% less memory utilization and 53% less execution time than other lightweight solutions. The stability is high in linear and differential cryptanalysis and resistive against DDoS attacks.