<scp>LightAgriCrypt</scp> : A Novel Lightweight Stream Cipher for Enhancing Security in Smart Agriculture Systems

ABSTRACT The agriculture industry has embraced recent technological advancements to ensure sustainable farming methods, increase resource efficiency, and boost productivity. Nonetheless, merging these technologies has raised new security concerns, particularly protecting personal data and preserving device communication integrity. We propose a lightweight stream cipher to address these challenges and facilitate secure communication in smart agriculture environments. The innovation lies in the key‐generating block, which utilizes a 128‐bit key and a 64‐bit Initialization Vector (IV) to produce an 80‐bit keystream through iterative round functions. This process involves the integration of a dynamic nonlinear logic module and a robust state update mechanism, ensuring high entropy and resistance against cryptanalytic attacks. In the second phase, the keystream is initialized to a nonlinear feedback shift register (NLFSR), where it undergoes additional transformations using specialized filter and output functions to generate the final encryption keystream. This two‐phase design not only ensures robust encryption but also adapts effectively to the resource constraints of smart agriculture systems. Comprehensive comparative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed cipher outperforms state‐of‐the‐art ciphers in multiple benchmarks, such as Grain v1, Grain‐128, Trivium, and Logic. The suggested cipher achieves higher throughput, ideal Shannon entropy values, and faster encryption and decryption times. It also exhibits robustness with near‐zero correlation coefficients, passes all 16 NIST randomness tests, and ensures efficient memory usage, low power consumption, and strong resistance to cryptographic attacks. This makes the proposed cipher a secure and efficient solution tailored to the unique needs of smart agriculture systems.