Choosing a Suitable Public Cryptosystem for Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in numerous devices in many areas in our life and in industries. It could comprise devices with sensors to gather and broadcast data over the internet. As the devices are IP-based and the media are shared, any user in the network can have an access to the communication contents. The only way to impose access control in the sensor networks is through cryptography. A key is applied to encrypt the communication to prevent from unauthorized access to the network. Choosing a suitable key management scheme is very important in sensor networks as it should satisfy the constraints of the sensors. There are two indispensable public cryptosystems available in the literatures-RSA and Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). ECC gives strong resistance to cryptanalytic attacks. So, it is used with smaller key sizes than RSA (Valenta, L., et al., 2018. In Search of CurveSwap: Measuring Elliptic Curve Implementations in the Wild. 2018 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), April; IEEE. pp.384–398). The most prettiness of using elliptic curve cryptography over other cryptosystems (i.e., RSA) is that it provides same security strength for a lesser key without breaching the system, thereby consuming less resources and ameliorating performances and fast data throughput of the devices. To choose a suitable public cryptosystem for use in IoT devices like sensor networks, elliptic curve cryptography and RSA are comparatively analyzed in this paper.