Efficient and Secure Cipher Scheme for Limited IoT Devices
Hassan N. Noura
1,2
, Ola Salman
1
and Ali Chehab
1
1
American University of Beirut, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Lebanon
2
Arab Open University, Department of Computer Sciences, Beirut, Lebanon
Keywords:
Cryptanalysis, Data Confidentiality, Cipher Scheme, Avalanche Effect, Key Derivation Function, Binary
Diffusion Matrix, Security Analysis.
Abstract:
In this paper, an effective and robust cipher scheme is proposed to cater for the resource-constrained nature
of IoT devices. The proposed cipher scheme is a combination of static and dynamic cryptographic structures,
towards ensuring better resistance and resilience against existing security attacks. More precisely, the proposed
solution is designed to be a lightweight cipher scheme, iterating a round function just twice, along with a
dynamic key-dependent block permutation. The proposed round function satisfies the required confusion and
diffusion properties, and consequently, it guarantees the desired cryptographic aspects such as message and
key avalanche effects. Finally, the security and performance tests confirm the effectiveness and the robustness
of the proposed cipher solution in terms of security level, the associated delay and required resources.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT),
billions of devices will be connected to the Internet.
Many of these devices are constrained in terms of
power consumption, memory capacity, and/or com-
putational capability. Such devices are used in an
IoT network to collect, monitor, and process data for
various types of applications. The ubiquitous con-
nectivity of these devices makes them prone to var-
ious security threats targeting main different secu-
rity aspects such as privacy, data confidentiality, in-
tegrity (data/system(s)), availability (data/system(s)),
and authentication (device/user and data origin au-
thentication). Therefore, protective mechanisms,
which can be based on either cryptographic or non-
cryptographic solutions, must be employed to pre-
serve data and network security. In this paper, we
aim at designing a lightweight cryptographic solution
to preserve data confidentiality in the IoT domain.
Given the huge amount of generated data and the lim-
itations of IoT devices, lightweight cipher algorithms
are needed to cope with the Big Data, time and re-
source constraints. The existing security solutions are
not suitable for constrained IoT devices. For exam-
ple, traditional cryptographic algorithms that provide
data confidentiality, such as the Advanced Encryp-
tion Standard (AES) (Daemen and Rijmen, 2013), re-
quire a high number of rounds and operations (Noura
et al., 2018), exhibiting a high overhead in terms
of latency and resources. To resolve this issue, al-
ternative chaotic cryptographic algorithms have been
recently proposed. However, these algorithms suf-
fer from several performance and security limitations
such as the need for floating-point computations, fi-
nite periodicity, and complex hardware implemen-
tation. Accordingly, and to respond better to real-
time IoT applications and tiny devices, recent works
proposed lightweight cipher algorithms with a rela-
tively low number of operations and rounds to mini-
mize the latency and resources (McKay et al., 2016;
Poschmann, 2009). Moreover, new lightweight cryp-
tographic algorithms that are based on the dynamic
key approach, with relatively small number of rounds,
were presented in (Noura et al., 2018; Melki et al.,
2018). In this context, this paper combines static
and dynamic cipher structures with a low number of
rounds to achieve a high level of security with mini-
mum delay and required resources. The proposed ci-
pher includes a simple round function that follows the
substitution-diffusion structure. This function is iter-
ated only twice to achieve the desired cryptographic
properties. The advantage of the proposed cipher,
compared to existing solutions (Noura et al., 2018;
Melki et al., 2018), is that it satisfies the avalanche
effect at the block level. The proposed cipher uses
a dynamic key to produce the required cryptographic
primitives for encryption/decryption. This dynamic
key is based on a device secret key and a nonce,
which complicates the attackers task in guessing and
breaking the proposed dynamic cryptographic algo-
rithm and the associated cryptographic primitives. Fi-
142
Noura, H., Salman, O. and Chehab, A.
Efficient and Secure Cipher Scheme for Limited IoT Devices.
DOI: 10.5220/0009858501420150
In Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2020) - DCNET, OPTICS, SIGMAP and WINSYS, pages 142-150
ISBN: 978-989-758-445-9
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2020 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved