Software Optimisation of Lightweight Klein Encryption in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices are prone to security vulnerabilities, especially when they are resource constrained. Lightweight cryptography is a promising encryption concept for IoT and WSN devices, that can mitigate these vulnerabilities. For example, Klein encryption is a lightweight block cipher, which has achieved popularity for the trade-off between performance and security. In this paper, we propose one novel method to enhance the efficiency of the Klein block cipher and the effects on the Central Processing Unit (CPU), memory usage, and processing time. Furthermore, we evaluated another approach on the performance of the Klein encryption iterations. These approaches were implemented in the Python language and ran on the Raspberry PI 3. We evaluated and analysed the results of two modified encryption algorithms and confirm that two enhancing techniques lead to significantly improved performance compared to the original algorithm.