Lightweight Cryptographic for Securing Constrained Resource IoT Devices

Abstract

Internet of Things IoT become a recent concept of communication technologies and a novel computing paradigm. The idea is to connect a variety of objects or things (e.g., RFID tags, NFC tags, sensors, etc.), which can interact and exchange data with each other anywhere and everywhere over the internet. With the evolution of IoT, the volume of data interchanged among connecting IoT devices is increasing at a remarkable scale due to the increase in number of the connected objects. Most of IoT devices are constrained devices and low resources that handling confidential and sensitive data. Therefore, using conventional cryptographic methods are unsuitable due to many issues and challenges like limited computational power, memory space, energy resources, performance cost, and security requirement. For that, lightweight cryptographic primitives (LWC) have been introduced. Many kinds of research continue moving forward to find a suitable algorithm that meets the specific demands of the IoT application. This paper provides an overview of the LWC primitives for IoT environment and presents various LWC algorithms based on their key dimension, block size, structures and number of rounds. We examine also the security viewpoint for the constrained IoT environment focusing on the relevant research challenges, difficulties and solutions. Finally, we proposed a secure scheme for improving the constrained IoT environment and conclude by discussing the open issues.