Exploring the Efficacy of Lightweight Encryption Techniques: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

With the widespread adoption of applications and IoT devices, modern society has come to rely on them in various aspects of daily life. These applications and devices cover a range of needs, including home appliances and even medical devices for body monitoring. Because a significant amount of data generated by IoT devices and applications must be transmitted over networks, particularly the Internet, there is an increased risk of cyber-attacks on this transmitted data. This data can be text, images, sound, or other forms, and it is critical to ensure its protection, especially if it contains valuable information. Extensive research has been conducted on various encryption algorithms to ensure the security of transmitted data, whether through block ciphers or stream ciphers. In addition, efforts have been made to increase encryption efficiency by securing the transmission channels. The question of this research is “what is the state of the art in the lightweight encryption in terms of strength and speed up the process?”. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research related to two main categories of lightweight encryption, and work focused on secure authentication between entities. The paper includes an analysis of the techniques used in each surveyed paper and highlights their main results.