A Lightweight Cellular Automata Based Encryption Technique for IoT Applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are resource-constrained devices with limitations such as low computation power, low communication capabilities, low bandwidths, high latency, and short-lived power. Therefore, securing communication among these devices is a key challenge for various sensitive applications. However, the conventional encryption and decryption algorithms, known as ciphers, cannot be implemented because of their inherent complexities of implementation and power requirements. One of the promising options available is to implement light-weight ciphers for these resource-constrained devices. Moreover, the choice of lightweight encryption tool has a great dependency on the type of IoT devices being used in an application. In this paper, a lightweight cellular automata (CA)-based cipher, named as Lightweight CA Cipher (LCC), has been proposed for IoT applications. In the proposed method, encryption is done at the perception layer, where the sensor nodes are deployed and decryption is done at the network layer where gateway devices are installed. The experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient than some of the existing ciphers like DES, 3DES when randomness, execution time, and implementation simplicity are considered as prime requirements. This cipher passes the randomness tests as prescribed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and it also passes all the DIEHARD tests and it establishes the security feature of LCC. Though it is specially designed for resource-constrained environments, it can be scaled up for a large number of sensor nodes.

Improving Availability and Confidentiality via Hyperchaotic Baseband Frequency Hopping Based on Optical OFDM in VLC Networks

“…Nevertheless, traditional standard encryption methods, like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), cannot be employed in IoT applications because of their disadvantages that do not fit the restricted memory and computational capacities of IoT machines [66]. These challenges can be met by suggesting lightweight encryption methods for these resource-restricted machines (see e.g., [67]- [72]). As an example, khattabi et al [72] suggested to utilize the conventional encryption simply for the first block of data in a particular frame (or superframe) being sent.…”

Revisiting Lightweight Encryption for IoT Applications: Error Performance and Throughput in Wireless Fading Channels With and Without Coding

“…However, conventional standard encryption algorithms, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), cannot be used in IoT applications due to their drawbacks (as mentioned earlier) that do not fit the limited memory space and computational capabilities of IoT devices [14]. To encounter these challenges, lightweight encryption methods have been proposed in literature to be implemented on these resource-constrained devices [15]- [25]. In [15], a lightweight cellular automata-based encryption algorithm has been proposed for IoT applications, where sensors' data is encrypted at the perception layer and decrypted at the gateway's network layer.…”

“…To encounter these challenges, lightweight encryption methods have been proposed in literature to be implemented on these resource-constrained devices [15]- [25]. In [15], a lightweight cellular automata-based encryption algorithm has been proposed for IoT applications, where sensors' data is encrypted at the perception layer and decrypted at the gateway's network layer. As compared to classical encryption algorithms like the data encryption standard (DES), the proposed algorithm in [15] has shown higher efficiency in terms of running time and implementation complexity.…”

“…In [15], a lightweight cellular automata-based encryption algorithm has been proposed for IoT applications, where sensors' data is encrypted at the perception layer and decrypted at the gateway's network layer. As compared to classical encryption algorithms like the data encryption standard (DES), the proposed algorithm in [15] has shown higher efficiency in terms of running time and implementation complexity. In [16], a modification to the lightweight key-policy attributebased encryption (KP-ABE) model has been proposed to improve its security level and efficiency such that it would be more suitable for IoT applications.…”

Lightweight cryptography in IoT networks: A survey

“…Ensuring privacy in smart city IoT nodes is challenging for several reasons. Firstly, the CPU in IoT devices is minimal and cannot compute complex algorithms [8][9][10][11][12]. Secondly, the power consumption of the security algorithm should be low since the majority of IoT devices work with a battery [9,[11][12][13][14][15].…”