Ultra-Lightweight Block Cipher in Medical Internet of Things for Secure Machine-to-Machine Communication Using FPGA

Abstract

With the swift growth of internet applications with the Internet of Things (IoT), medical sensors and online medical service has become mandatory part of every use case in the recent years. The health care system has become more connected with the increasing use of IoT devices, and these medical devices introduce vulnerabilities into health care organizations. Recently, there are significant cyber-threats against the medical IoT and some resisting elements of cryptosystem that cloud help to combat these threats. Hence, in medical IoT, security and privacy of patients are among the major areas of concern. However, such methods are very complex to implement in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platforms. This paper proposes an ultra-lightweight block ciphers (ULBC) for medical IoT applications. The first contribution of ULBC algorithm is to propose the chaotic Whale optimization (CWO) algorithm for key management, which improves the security and reduce hardware cost by reducing the number of iteration rounds. The second contribution is to introduce the flexible design of modified ULBC algorithm that provides an area, power and delay efficient design with attack free feature. The flexible design avoids the reconfigurable runtime, power; and it is surely different from existing block ciphers. Finally, the ULBC algorithm is synthesized in Xilinx tool with different FPGA families and the performance is compared with existing lightweight ciphers in terms of maximum clock frequency, power consumption and hardware utilization.