Energy-Efficient Hybrid Cryptographic Framework for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

Faateh  Ibrahim; Anikur  Rehman; Ahmad Hassan Ahmad  Alzghoul

Authors

Faateh Ibrahim Wuhantextile University, Sunshi ne Campus Jangxia District Dorm 7a
Anikur Rehman Wuhantextile University, Sunshi ne Campus Jangxia District Dorm 7a
Ahmad Hassan Ahmad Alzghoul Wuhantextile University, Sunshi ne Campus Jangxia District Dorm 7a

Abstract

This work presents a hybrid cryptographic framework for resource constrained IoT devices that balances security performance and energy use. Elliptic curve primitives are used to establish authenticated sessions with forward secrecy and authenticated encryption with AES 128 or a light cipher on nodes with very limited resources while the payload is encrypted. The framework is running on Arduino Uno, ESP32 and STM32F411. Improvements with increased compressed ciphertext bit rates lowering the energy per encrypted kB, quicker key exchange and less memory use are measured in comparison to an AES + RSA baseline without losing the resistance to replay, man-in-the-middle and brute force attacks. The methodology associates precise metrics in terms of energy efficiency, performance, memory footprint and security level and justifies them on instrumented experiments. The results to support the wearable health, smart agriculture, as well as environmental sensing adoption.