Energy Efficient Low Resource Consumption Lightweight Block Ciphers for Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) refers the system of interrelated heterogeneous uniquely identifiable devices with the ability to collect data and communicate with each other to enable applications/services. The security and privacy are the two major issues as IoT applications are providing personalized services by collecting users' private, sensitive and confidential data. The traditional cryptographic methods are not appropriate for most of the IoT applications due to resource-constraints. The lightweight block ciphers are the most common solution to provide security and privacy in IoT. In this paper, various popular lightweight block cipher algorithms and their performance metrics are discussed in detail. The comparative performance analysis of the block ciphers are investigated through experimental study in terms of various metrics and their results are presented. Based on the study, we made recommendations to choose a suitable cryptographic algorithm for an IoT environment depending upon the desired level of security and privacy requirements. The detailed directions are also given which can be considered as guidelines for designing new security solutions.