A Lightweight Encryption Algorithm to Secure Iot Devices

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography is an effective solution for ensuring confidentiality and privacy in resource-constrained environments, particularly in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. These systems consist of a large number of IoT devices, such as sensor nodes and embedded devices that handle sensitive data and are connected via the Internet, making them susceptible to various types of attacks. Considering the constrained processing capability, memory size, and energy of these devices, this article proposes a lightweight block cipher that aims to provide security for IoT devices, with a focus on achieving efficient software implementation, particularly in devices with 32-bit processors. The structural design of the suggested algorithm is based on Type-2 Generalized Feistel Networks (GFN), which are based on four branches of 32-bit and simple key scheduling. To enhance the diffusion and strength of the GFN structure, a partial permutation layer has been added to the cipher. Moreover, to reduce the implementation cost, a simple round function has been designed using low-cost operations like Addition, XOR, and Rotation. Security of the suggested algorithm has been validated through security analysis, and the results show meeting the criteria for avalanche effect with 50.97% Key Sensitivity and 50.58% Plaintext Sensitivity, and the correlation coefficienttest results indicate a weak correlation between the plaintext and ciphertext, this makes it difficult to retrieve the plaintext from the ciphertext. When designing lightweight algorithms, one of the primary objectives is to enhance performance. To evaluate the algorithm's performance, we tested its execution time, code size, memory consumption, and throughput on real IoT devices, such as ESP8266 and ESP32, as an embedded cryptographic module. Based on the experimental results and security analysis, the suggested algorithm showed a good grade of security and higher performance in encryption and decryption operations than other lightweight algorithms, which makes it capable of providing a framework for securing data in the restricted IoT environment.