ENHANCING AES-LIKE IOT SECURITY WITH DIVERSE S-BOX AND INVOLUTORY MATRIX IN MIXCOLUMNS TRANSFORMATIONS

Embedded systems are widely used in various fields, including device-to-device communication, vehicular and maritime mobility, and public infrastructure. These systems often involve the exchange and transmission of sensitive and critical information, which requires protection. However, these devices have limited hardware resources, necessitating compact size and low cost, which restricts the complexity of security algorithms. Therefore, an improved AES algorithm, specifically a lightweight AES-like method, is proposed. It enhances the SubBytes step through dynamic S-box lookups table and uses different 8×8 affine matrix transformations to scramble data. The proposed method is 31% faster than traditional approaches. Furthermore, in the MixColumns transformation, the encryption process using 16×16 involutory matrix achieves 66% speed improvement over the matrix multiplication traditional approach. circulant matrix, while the branch number increases from 5 to 17. Finally, the encryption process also reduces decryption time.