Efficient Cryptographic Configurations and Lightweight Communication Protocols for Secure Smart Home Systems

Smart home technologies have advanced rapidly. It is reshaping everyday life through interconnected devices that collect and exchange sensitive data. However, this seamless connectivity poses substantial security and privacy Challenges. Most of the smart home devices are not equipped with sufficient computational power to support traditional cryptographic methods. This research evaluates and analyzes the efficiency of 4 cryptographic algorithms namely AES-128, ChaCha20, RC4 and Twofish. It is also assessed on 4 popular smart home devices such as Arduino Nano 33 IoT, ESP32-C3, Raspberry Pi Zero W and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Power consumption, encryption delay, data overhead and encryption duration were analyzed using 2 protocols namely Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocols in secure communication scenarios. The findings revealed ChaCha20 was well-suited for constrained devices, whereas AES-128 confirmed strong performance on more powerful boards. MQTT showed lower latency than HTTP but relied more on static key management to maintain optimal security. The research underscores the trade-offs between security and performance. Also, it offers practical findings for choosing cryptographic configurations in smart home environments. These results guide researches in creating secure, energy-efficient and scalable solutions exactly suited for smart home applications.