Conventional Cryptographic Algorithms Research Articles

A Survey on Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms in IoT

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) will soon penetrate every aspect of human life. Several threats and vulnerabilities are present due to the different devices and protocols used in an IoT system. Conventional cryptographic primitives or algorithms cannot run efficiently and are unsuitable for resource-constrained devices in IoT. Hence, a recently developed area of cryptography, known as lightweight cryptography, has been introduced, and over the years, numerous lightweight algorithms have been suggested. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of the lightweight cryptography field and considers various popular lightweight cryptographic algorithms proposed and evaluated over the past years for analysis. Different taxonomies of the algorithms and other associated concepts were also provided, which helps new researchers gain a quick overview of the field. Finally, a set of 11 selected ultra-lightweight algorithms are analyzed based on the software implementations, and their evaluation is carried out using different metrics.

First end‐to‐end PQC protected DPU‐to‐DPU communications

AbstractThe appearance of quantum computing in the short foreseeable future and its capability to break conventional cryptographic algorithms forces to change the paradigm of secure real‐time communications. Thus, government organizations, data centers, and enterprises among others are migrating their public key infrastructure towards using post‐quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms in order to mitigate the security threats posed by quantum computers. This letter presents the first quantum resilient secure end‐to‐end communication link based on PQC algorithms operating between two data‐processing units DPU. Both data‐processing units employ on‐board ARM processors to perform the computationally expensive cryptographic building blocks—in that case CRYSTALS‐Kyber as a key encapsulation mechanism and CRYSTALS‐Dilithium for digital signature scheme in combination with advanced encryption standard with 256‐bit key.

A Cryptographic Security Mechanism for Dynamic Groups for Public Cloud Environments

Cloud computing has emerged as a significant technology domain, primarily due to the emergence of big data, machine learning, and quantum computing applications. While earlier, cloud computing services were focused mainly on providing storage and some infrastructures/platforms for applications, the need to advance computational power analysis of massive datasets. It has made cloud computing almost inevitable from most client-based applications, mobile applications, or web applications. The allied challenge to protect data shared from and to cloud-based platforms has cropped up with the necessity to access public clouds. While conventional cryptographic algorithms have been used for securing and authenticating cloud data, advancements in cryptanalysis and access to faster computation have led to possible threats to the traditional security of cloud mechanisms. This has led to extensive research in homomorphic encryption pertaining to cloud security. In this paper, a security mechanism is designed targeted towards dynamic groups using public clouds. Cloud security mechanisms generally face a significant challenge in terms of overhead, throughput, and execution time to encrypt data from dynamic groups with frequent member addition and removal. A two-stage homomorphic encryption process is proposed for data security in this paper. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated in terms of the salient cryptographic metrics, which are the avalanche effect, throughput, and execution time. A comparative analysis with conventional cryptographic algorithms shows that the proposed system outperforms them regarding the cryptographic performance metrics.

Quantum key distribution over FSO channel using error reconciliation protocol

Quantum key distribution (QKD) has evolved as a robust way of secret key distribution based on renowned modern physics concepts. To transmit sensitive information in the government, private, and personal sectors, high-security levels are now necessary. All conventional cryptographic algorithms applied in the communication models, which rely on mathematical models and conceptual assumptions, are unsecure. Thus, QKD systems are the best choice for protecting this information as a countermeasure since they provide unconditional security. In this paper, a design is proposed for the FSO channel using the CASCADE protocol under different atmospheric condition such as haze, rain and snow. The suggested framework’s effectiveness and security in the context of QKD with two non-orthogonal photon states are assessed. Simulation results of this model show the percentage of original sequence recovery; the number of errors removed, optical spectrum at transmitter and receiver for a base frame length of 104 bits. Moreover, Error correction is calculated per iteration to improve signal quality at the receiver side and compared to previous work. The calculated value in this article shows a better result. Hence, both the sender and the receiver could achieve a security key using this method.

Timestamp Based OTP and Enhanced RSA Key Exchange Scheme with SIT Encryption to Secure IoT Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an emerging technology and is expected to connect billions of more devices to the internet in the near future. With time, more and more devices like wearables, intelligent home systems, and industrial automation devices are getting connected to the internet. IoT devices primarily transfer data using wireless communication networks, introducing more vulnerabilities like man-in-the-middle-attacks and eavesdropping. These security concerns are customary for any device communicating over the internet because of its intrinsic open nature. These problems are usually subdued by conventional cryptographic algorithms used in typical systems that are power-hungry and computationally intensive, making them infeasible to be used in IoT devices since they run on low-powered chips, limiting performance, memory, and bandwidth. Hence, there is a requirement to adopt lightweight cryptographic algorithms that can abate the security issues while using low computational resources, which is the constraint in the given scenario. Hence, we propose an end-to-end secured IoT system that ensures the system’s integrity is never compromised using lightweight cryptographic algorithms. We propose a three-module system, where the first module handles user authentication using a time-based one-time password, the second secures communication using lightweight enhanced RSA, and the third performs data encryption using Feistel-based enhanced SIT. This kind of system is designed to deal with security challenges in IoT devices, ensuring adequate data security while reducing the computational footprint using lightweight cryptography.

Application of 2D Materials in Hardware Security for Internet‐of‐Things: Progress and Perspective

Internet‐of‐Things (IoT) is a ubiquitous network that features a tremendous amount of data and myriads of heterogeneous devices, which are interconnected and accessible or controllable anywhere and anytime. The security of IoT is therefore unequivocally crucial in several aspects, such as device‐to‐device communication, sensing and actuating, and information exchange. Conventional cryptographic algorithms and silicon‐based security primitives are constantly challenged by evolving methods of attack. By far, many efforts and achievements have been made using 2D materials for various electronics applications. Therefore, it is plausible to explore the implementation of hardware security using 2D materials, for example, true random number generators (TRNGs), physical unclonable functions (PUFs), camouflage, and anticounterfeit. TRNGs and PUFs are critical elements of hardware security and are widely deployed in cryptographic keys, identification, and authentication. In contrast to conventional utilization of manufacturing variations, security primitives using 2D materials have other entropy sources to exploit, such as the random nature of material growth and intrinsic randomness in charge trapping/detrapping. In this review, research progresses in 2D material‐based TRNGs, PUFs, and other security applications are summarized, along with the discussion on entropy sources, reliability, circuit, and machine learning modeling attacks launched on TRNGs and PUFs.

An Efficient Blockchain Based Data Access with Modified Hierarchical Attribute Access Structure with CP-ABE Using ECC Scheme for Patient Health Record

Secure patient health record (PHR) information exchange via cloud computing is a considerable security risk to user privacy. The fundamental reason of this issue is cloud computing’s reliance on trustworthy third parties to share data across it. To exchange data securely, many conventional cryptographic algorithms employ various keying approaches. However, relying on a trusted third party compromises the privacy of consumers’ data. To offer secure communication without the involvement of a third party, a distributed blockchain based (DBC) ciphertext–policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) approach is employed in this study. Because of bilinear paring and simple scalar multiplication factors, the proposed CP-ABE system is entirely dependent on elliptic curve cryptography to reduce complexity. Furthermore, the data requester provides dynamic attributes, and a user-centric access policy is created, allowing multiple authorities to manage the attributes and provide data access. Data confidentiality, data authentication, user authentication, and tamper-proof data are all guaranteed by the suggested method. The DBC-CP-ABE method is used to provide user-centric access policies and effective key management.

Utilization of Asmuth-Bloom Algorithm In Data Security Using Secret Sharing Protocol

Conventional cryptographic algorithms cannot be applied to solve a plaintext (message) into several ciphertexts because conventional cryptographic algorithms can only produce a ciphertext from a plaintext (message). In this case, a cryptographic protocol can be applied, namely the Asmuth-Bloom secret sharing protocol. The methodology used to analyze and design application software and learning the Asmuth-Bloom secret sharing protocol is the Waterfall method. This research is intended to produce a learning software that is able to display the working process of the Asmuth-Bloom secret sharing protocol and the application of the Asmuth-Bloom secret sharing protocol. The working procedure described by the software includes the key formation process, the shadow formation process and the shadow merge process. The software also provides an interface to do the process of splitting a text file into n shadow files and merging m shadow files into the original text file. In addition, the software also provides basic theories related to the two cryptographic protocols and reports the results of the calculation process are stored in a text file with *.txt extension

Software Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Reduced AES for IoT Applications

IoT devices include RFID tags, microprocessors, sensors, readers, and actuators. Their main characteristics are their limited resources and computing capabilities, which pose critical challenges to the reliability and security of their applications. Encryption is necessary for security when using these limited-resource devices, but conventional cryptographic algorithms are too heavyweight and resource-demanding to run on IoT infrastructures. This paper presents a lightweight version of AES (called LAES), which provides competitive results in terms of randomness levels and processing time, operating on GF(24). Detailed mathematical operations and proofs are presented concerning LAES rounds design fundamentals. The proposed LAES algorithm is evaluated based on its randomness, performance, and power consumption; it is then compared to other cryptographic algorithm variants, namely Present, Clefia, and AES. The design of the randomness and performance analysis is based on six measures developed with the help of the NIST test statistical suite of cryptographic applications. The performance and power consumption of LAES on a low-power, 8-bit microcontroller unit were evaluated using an Arduino Uno board. LAES was found to have competitive randomness levels, processing times, and power consumption compared to Present, Clefia, and AES.

A Scoping Study on Lightweight Cryptography Reviews in IoT

The efforts in designing and developing lightweight cryptography (LWC) started a decade ago. Many scholarly studies in literature report the enhancement of conventional cryptographic algorithms and the development of new algorithms. This significant number of studies resulted in the rise of many review studies on LWC in IoT. Due to the vast number of review studies on LWC in IoT, it is not known what the studies cover and how extensive the review studies are. Therefore, this article aimed to bridge the gap in the review studies by conducting a systematic scoping study. It analyzed the existing review articles on LWC in IoT to discover the extensiveness of the reviews and the topics covered. The results of the study suggested that many review studies are classified as overview-types of review focusing on generic LWC. Further, the topics of the reviews mainly focused on symmetric block cryptography, while limited reviews were found on asymmetric-key and hash in LWC. The outcomes of this study revealed that the reviews in LWC in IoT are still in their premature stage and researchers are encouraged to explore by conducting review studies in the less-attended areas. An extensive review of studies that cover these two topics is deemed necessary to establish a balance of scholarly works in LWC for IoT and encourage more empirical research in the area.

FPGA implementation of a lightweight simple encryption scheme to secure IoT using novel key scheduling technique

ABSTRACT Internet of things (IoT), being the technology of this generation and several billions of electronic devices exchanging a huge secure information. With the low resource devices like the sensors, RFIDs etc. to the super computers and the clouds the security and privacy issues remain a concern. While the conventional cryptographic algorithms approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, could be embedded into the Low-resource devices their performance may be reduced, then the design of Ciphers for such resource constrained devices become a challenge with the security principles confidentiality, Integrity and Availability remains the same.This paper proposes, simple encryption schemes based on arithmetic operations Addition-Modulo/Multiplication Modulo, Rotation and XOR hence the name ARX/MRX. The cipher schemes have been implemented using reversible logic and Vedic Mathematics. The adders have been implanted using reversible logic and multipliers and the modular algorithms have been implemented using the combination of Vedic maths and Reversible logic. The software and hardware implementations are presented. The Histogram, Correlation coefficient and Entropy are found for the grayscale plaintext image using MATLAB to evaluate the security, and the hardware implementation is done writing Verilog code using Xilinx-Vivado and is verified using Nexys-4 Artix-7 FPGA the performance of the encryption schemes are analysed and compared with the existing literature.

Efficient Certificateless Online/Offline Signature Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become more commonplace, including in healthcare settings. For example, in a healthcare WBAN deployment, body sensor units (BSUs) are used to sense and collect health-related and medical-related information prior to sending relevant information to the server for analysis that can subsequently inform treatment plan. Given the sensitivity of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit, data authentication is fundamental to the success of such systems. However, BSUs are generally resource constrained and, hence, conventional cryptographic algorithms are not practical. Therefore, in this article, we propose an efficient certificateless online/offline signature scheme and design a lightweight data authentication protocol for WBANs. We then evaluate the security and performance of our proposed scheme, where the security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme satisfies existential unforgeability under the random oracle model. Findings from the performance evaluation also demonstrate that our scheme incurs very low computational cost during the signing operations. In comparison to several other competing approaches, our proposed scheme achieves a significant reduction in computational cost (up to 89%) for the offline signer and supports batch verification to reduce the verifier's execution time. In addition, we also show that the signature size of our proposed scheme is similar to those of the conventional signature schemes.

LBC-IoT: Lightweight Block Cipher for IoT Constraint Devices

With the new era of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, many devices with limited resources are utilized. Those devices are susceptible to a significant number of new malware and other risks emerging rapidly. One of the most appropriate methods for securing those IoT applications is cryptographic algorithms, as cryptography masks information by eliminating the risk of collecting any meaningful information patterns. This ensures that all data communications are private, accurate, authenticated, authorized, or non-repudiated. Since conventional cryptographic algorithms have been developed specifically for devices with limited resources; however, it turns out that such algorithms are not ideal for IoT restricted devices with their current configuration. Therefore, lightweight block ciphers are gaining popularity to meet the requirements of low-power and constrained devices. A new ultra-lightweight secret-key block-enciphering algorithm named “LBC-IoT” is proposed in this paper. The proposed block length is 32-bit supporting key lengths of 80-bit, and it is mainly based on the Feistel structure. Energy-efficient cryptographic features in “LBC-IoT” include the use of simple functions (shift, XOR) and small rigid substitution boxes (4-bit-S-boxes). Besides, it is immune to different types of attacks such as linear, differential, and side-channel as well as flexible in terms of implementation. Moreover, LBC-IoT achieves reasonable performance in both hardware and software compared to other recent algorithms. LBC-IoT’s hardware implementation results are very promising (smallest ever area “548” GE) and competitive with today’s leading lightweight ciphers. LBC-IoT is also ideally suited for ultra-restricted devices such as RFID tags.

A New Image Encryption Scheme Based on Hybrid Chaotic Maps

Chaos-based encryption algorithms offer many advantages over conventional cryptographic algorithms, such as speed, high security, affordable overheads for computation, and procedure power. In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation algorithm for data encryption based on double chaotic systems. A new image encryption algorithm based on the proposed chaotic maps is introduced. The proposed chaotification method is a hybrid technique that parallels and combines the chaotic maps. It is based on combination between Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to decompose the original image into sub-bands and both permutation and diffusion properties are attained using the chaotic states and parameters of the proposed maps, which are then concerned in shuffling of pixel and operations of substitution, respectively. Security, statistical test analyses, and comparison with other techniques indicate that the proposed algorithm has promising effect and it can resist several common attacks. Namely, the average values for UACI and NPCR metrics were 33.6248% and 99.6472%, respectively. Additionally, unscrambling quality can fulfill security and execution prerequisites as evidenced by PSNR (9.005955) and entropy (7.999275) values. In sum, the proposed method has enough ability to achieve low residual intelligibility with high quality recovered data, high sensitivity, and high security performance compared to some other recent literature approaches.

Proof of Concept of Scalable Integration of Internet of Things and Blockchain in Healthcare.

The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) brought innovation along with unprecedented benefits of convenience and efficacy in many operations that were otherwise very cumbersome. This innovation explosion has surfaced a new dimension of vulnerability and physical threat to the data integrity of IoT networks. Implementing conventional cryptographic algorithms on IoT devices is not future-proof as these devices are constrained in terms of computational power, performance, and memory. In this paper, we are proposing a novel framework, a unique model that integrates IoT networks with a blockchain to address potential privacy and security threats for data integrity. Smart contracts are instrumental in this integration process and they are used to handle device authentication, authorization and access-control, and data management. We further share a new design model for interfaces to integrate both platforms while highlighting its performance results over the existing models. With the incorporation of off-chain data storage into the framework, overall scalability of the system can be increased. Finally, our research concludes how the proposed framework can be fused virtually into any existing IoT applications with minimal modifications.

Consistency Penalized Graph Matching for Image-Based Identification of Dendritic Patterns

Recently, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) have received considerable attention from the research community due to their potential use in security mechanisms for applications such as the Internet of things (IoT). The concept generally employs the fabrication variability and naturally embedded randomness of device characteristics for secure identification. This approach complements and improves upon the conventional cryptographic security algorithms by covering their vulnerability against counterfeiting, cloning attacks, and physical hijacking. In this work, we propose a new identification/authentication mechanism based on a specific implementation of optical PUFs based on electrochemically formed dendritic patterns . Dendritic tags are built by growing unique, complex, and unclonable nano-scaled metallic patterns on highly nonreactive substrates using electrolyte solutions. Dendritic patterns with 3D surfaces are technically impossible to reproduce, hence they can be used as the fingerprints of objects. Current optical PUF-based identification mechanisms rely on image processing methods that require high-complexity computations and massive storage and communication capacity to store and exchange high-resolution image databases in large-scale networks. To address these issues, we propose a light-weight identification algorithm that converts the images of dendritic patterns into representative graphs and uses a graph-matching approach for device identification. More specifically, we develop a probabilistic graph matching algorithm that makes linkages between the similar feature points in the test and reference graphs while considering the consistency of their local subgraphs. The proposed method demonstrates a high level of accuracy in the presence of imaging artifacts, noise, and skew compared to existing image-based algorithms. The computational complexity of the algorithm grows linearly with the number of extracted feature points and is therefore suitable for large-scale networks.

High-performance ECC processor architecture design for IoT security applications

In recent years, the usage of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) in IoT applications is steadily increasing. The end nodes in IoT applications demand optimized device performance in terms of reduced power consumption and improved computing speed while not compromising on the security of the connected devices. ECC provides better security standards compared with many conventional cryptographic algorithms providing further scope to optimize the performance parameters. This work focuses on improving the key parameters like computing speed, area required for hardware implementation of ECC and demonstrates an efficient way of using the hardware resource sharing and scheduling mechanisms in elliptic curve group operations in affine coordinates which is crucial for implementation of scalar multiplication over prime field $$\mathbb {F}_{p}$$ . With the proposed scalar multiplication hardware architecture, we have achieved a good area-delay product and a significant reduction in cycle count when compared with other reported designs using the same affine coordinates. The proposed architecture has been implemented with 256 bits in both Xilinx Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGA devices. The FPGA synthesis results show that a throughput of 68.52 kbps at a clock frequency of 124.2 MHz is achieved for $$\mathbb {F}_{256}$$ and the computation time is reduced around 1 ms without using any DSP slices.

Conditional Re-encoding Method for Cryptanalysis-Resistant White-Box AES

Conventional cryptographic algorithms are not sufficient to protect secret keys and data in white-box environments, where an attacker has full visibility and control over an executing software code. For this reason, cryptographic algorithms have been redesigned to be resistant to white-box attacks. The first white-box AES (WB-AES) implementation was thought to provide reliable security in that all brute force attacks are infeasible even in white-box environments; however, this proved not to be the case. In particular, Billet and others presented a cryptanalysis of WB-AES with 230 time complexity, and Michiels and others generalized it for all substitution-linear transformation ciphers. Recently, a collision-based cryptanalysis was also reported. In this paper, we revisit Chow and others’ first WB-AES implementation and present a conditional re-encoding method for cryptanalysis protection. The experimental results show that there is approximately a 57% increase in the memory requirement and a 20% increase in execution speed.

Cryptanalysis of “an improvement over an image encryption method based on total shuffling”

In the past two decades, several image encryption algorithms based on chaotic systems had been proposed. Many of the proposed algorithms are meant to improve other chaos based and conventional cryptographic algorithms. Whereas, many of the proposed improvement methods suffer from serious security problems. In this paper, the security of the recently proposed improvement method for a chaos-based image encryption algorithm is analyzed. The results indicate the weakness of the analyzed algorithm against chosen plain-text.

CBC and Interleaved CBC Implementations of PACTS Cryptographic Algorithm

PACTS (Parallelized Adaptive Cipher with Transposition and Substitution) is a new class of Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithm designed using traditional techniques to efficiently utilize the parallel computing capabilities of the modern computing systems. It overcomes the performance inconsistencies prevalent in conventional cryptographic algorithms when they are implemented in different computing systems with different processing capabilities. The size of the key and the plain text blocks of PACTS are each 1024-bits. The adaptive nature of this algorithm is achieved by incorporating flexibility in the size of the key and plain text sub-blocks and the number of rounds. Level of Intra-packet parallelization, variety in grain size and the required security strength are achieved by suitably deciding the sub-block size. Flow of the algorithm is made dynamic by determining the execution steps at runtime using the value of the key. In spite of these advantages PACTS always produces the same cipher text block for a particular plain text block when the same key is used. CBC mode along with 2- way and 4 way Interleaved CBC modes are employed to overcome this problem. The performance of the PACTS in ECB, CBC and Interleaved CBC modes are analyzed with implementations in shared memory parallel computing environment using Open MP, Java Threads and MPI.